Our brand new game

Today while Lenara was drawing and I was making another set of candle glasses, we had a cool new "activity 18+" idea. Lenara must have gotten bored and she got her cars out (including a Landrover - of course!!!) and played with them instead of drawing. She asked me to draw as well. But I had no idea what to add to her expressive-lines-all-over-drawing. Often I feel like all figurative and objective drawing I can think of clearly doesn't match her style. And I don't want her to think my drawings are better in any way or a goal for her (I've had a friend who did painting classes for children and she told me about different concepts. Her concept of giving no instructions at all and not intervening in any way was a great success - not only in the process, as those kids loved the class, but also in the extra-ordinary results).

I started out with doing expressive-lines-all-over, but not feeling authentic doing it. Then for some reason I ended up having two pencils in one hand and I started drawing. Wow! That truely caught Lenara's attention. And as she had the cars on the table - I got an idea: I drew a road and a parking lot for the cars. We had to each take the route many many times. Then we continually added things - she also had her own ideas, i.e. trees, a pond, a gas station where we had to stop with the cars, a duck to the pond, luggage at the starting point which we had to load and unload. We could've continued for a while... but we got interrupted.

Anyway, I loved the process how this little game developed. And how much we both got into it. I think drawing and developing landscapes or houses or whatever we need for playing with our dolls/horses/cars/whatever, will become a new creative element in our everyday playing. Highly recommended!