For more than twenty years we have had a piece of abstract art in our Living Room. My kids made this when they were 4 and 5 and when I notice it, it still makes me smile.

We saw an article in a Sunset magazine when our kids were small about a kids art project that sounded fun. The idea was to unleash your little artists, your local Pollack on a piece of art larger than would fit on your fridge.

What you will need:

3-4 colors of latex house paint
Some brushes
A great big piece of canvas
A space that might get some paint on it
Painting clothes
Young artists

You don’t have to use house paint for this project but a good latex based house paint will make the cleanup easier for kids, brushes, etc. We chose color specifically designed to blend with the colors of the room at the time.

We took a large canvas and taped it to our garage, decked out the kids in clothes we did not care about and had them go at it.

Each of our kids was given a section of the canvas. My daughter Beth, as you can see from this photo, was a better house painter than artist. She was good at giving good coverage, but that wasn’t what we were going for. Mike was a bit better.

We were encouraging the kids to throw the paint at the canvas, but we probably could have started with better directions or maybe with a larger variety of tools than brushes.

If you look closely at the original photo, you will notice that the part of the canvas that we ended up framing was neither of the sections that the kids worked on. Our favorite part was actually the part of the canvas that they were standing on.

One of the things I love about this project, is that if you look close you can see 3 and 4 year old footprints.