My Son: The Artist

     Nathan has displayed an amazing ability in the area of drawing. Many of his best works are on the largest scale possible, our back patio, in chalk so we have to quickly snap pictures of them before they get drawn over or washed off.

Self Portrait on dry erase board- making a "weird" face

Airplane on chalkboard

     His drawings of people all have some similar traits like the curlicue hands and feet. (How cute is that by the way?) But the hair and certain facial features vary depending on the subject. The heads are big for the bodies but the arms and legs are wonderfully proportional to one another.

This was an early work featuring Grandpa.

     Daniel, as most of you know is quite the artist and though his siblings would deny it they are also very artistic. In other words this is all from the other side of the family so I find myself unable to fully express to Nathan how amazing I think these are. I say things like "Wow!" and "I love it!" but occasionally have to ask leading questions to ascertain exactly what I am looking at. Daniel taught me that you should say things like, "Tell me about your drawing." and other leading questions that are less likely to be interpreted as "I have no idea what this thing is" and are therefore more likely to encourage future attempts.

Guess who? Larry the Cucumber!

Often, I need little to no interpretation because you can tell exactly what he was going for which boggles my stick-figure drawing mind. When I taught physics my students often mistook my drawings of cats and people for cows or buildings, or sometimes just had no idea where the squiggles were going. I did a lot of labeling for the benefit of all involved.
I love thinking about how he might use this as he gets older, maybe I have the next Monet growing up in my home! And if he wants to go into astrophysics, that's okay with me too. I will admit that I am praying that he doesn't go into the NFL, I don't know if my heart could take it.

Bumble Bees- this is my favorite

The question that I keep asking myself is how to encourage him to keep it up. We all have stories about the things that we excelled at as children but just never kept up, either because we lost interest or because of some sort of bad experience we had. I don't want that to happen to my sweet boy.

Sea Monster from a How To Draw book

On the other hand, I don't want to be that parent who thinks that their child is utter genius and, ignoring the protest and other interests of the child, push them to hard.

Half a bell pepper makes a clover stamp. Thanks Pinterest!

I think my happy medium lies in bragging about him here, and on Facebook  giving him lots of encouraging words and making sure he has lots of opportunities to explore his budding talent. Even if it means sacrificing my kitchen table to bell pepper art.