Outside of the Box

A rather later start this morning but Davies and Scarlett were straight to their DSs to carry on where they’d left off yesterday. The sun was shining though and I insisted we all go out for an hour or so to get some fresh air / exercise / break from things with plugs and rechargers.

So we took yet more battery operated gadgets to the beach! 😆

We’d got D and S a metal detector each so we headed down to the beach to try them out. A bit of research back home shows that although they are probably fine for at home in the garden the loose, wet terrain of a beach requires something a bit more sophisticated and aside from Ady’s steel toe caps and a rusty lump of metal lying on top of the pebbles we found nothing with them. However, the very act of walking along slowly, nose to the ground meant we did discover all sorts of other treasures. We found all sorts of pretty shells, two fossils, loads of washed and tumbled glass, crabs claws and a clam with a clam still in it and a mermaids purse with an unhatched baby dogfish still in it – both of which we put back in the sea before seagulls feasted on them.

It was gorgeous down there, the sun was shining, the sky was bright blue, it was really mild and the sea was just starting to go out after high tide. Walking along made us realise how much we definitely want to remain close to the coast no matter where we end up living; this year we have spent a lot of time at the beach, we’d all miss it a lot if it wasn’t at the end of the road.

We pretty much had the place to ourselves just after 10am but by the time we left just before midday there were tribes of people out testing new bikes, kites, skates and scooters and walking dogs.

Home for lunch and Davies and I started on an airfix model my Mum had given him yesterday of Wallace and Gromit. It was a pretty tricky one with 100 odd pieces, very fiddly and Davies kept coming back to it and then wandering off again. He helped to paint it (and I even managed to leave it looking like it had been assisted by a seven year old instead of obsessively painting over everything to make it perfect ;)). It does look pretty good actually 🙂

Inbetween he and Scarlett flitted about with DSing, including having a go on each others’ games for a while and then Davies got out some of his art stuff. I’d got him a set of tubes of watercolour, a set of nice paint brushes and a pallet, a set with various charcoals, pencils, tortillions and an artists dummy (I’ve had one for years and it’s one of the few things I’ve not just given to the children but retained as mine and said they are not to just have to play with), a proper pad of watercolour paper and a proper pad of pastels paper (as he got a set of pastels from Babs for his birthday). Scarlett got a new set of (nice) watercolour blocks in a tin and a smaller pad of watercolour paper as I don’t think she is ready just yet for the moderation of not squeezing out the whole tube if I gave her watercolours like that :lol:. So he broke out the watercolours, Ady helped him choose a few colours and showed him which brushes to use, he sketched out his picture with pencil and then used watercolours, blended and mixed with water and using different brush strokes to create his planned picture of a swan on a lake against a sunny sky:

For a very first go I thought he did really well and was clearly trying to put some of the stuff we’d talked about into practise. We’ve been looking at the sky a lot lately and talking about how many colours we can see in it, particularly with some of the stunning early sunrises we’ve had the last couple of weeks colouring the sky pink, red, orange and yellow along with the blues, greys and white and he’d clearly tried to bring some of that into his picture.

Scarlett had a go with her paints and was more just testing out how they worked on proper paper and how much colour to load on and how much to dilute it with water and created this:

which I also really like.

Davies then had a go with his pastels and tried a technique we’d seen in a story book illustrations recently of drawing in pencil then colouring roughly in the lines. It had also been used on the menu cards at the place we went to for lunch on Christmas eve although that was ink drawings with one or two colours picked out. Again, for a first attempt at a style I think it’s pretty good:

There’s more than a bit of the Charlie and Lola about it I think, with the lines being very simple and the colour being scribbles rather than solid – the drawing itself isn’t great, he can do much more detailed and accurate, it’s deliberately cartoony – and of course is of me and Ady :).

And finally, because there was a bit of paint left on the pallett (and because I was dying to have a go!) I did a quick one of trees against a blue sky – not very ambitious or fantastic but as Katy recented said there is such a difference to using *nice* materials instead of the cheap and crappy ‘kiddie’ ones that the joy of art is far more accessible to you when you work with them:

We tidied up, the children had tea, lots of TV was watched (mostly Simpsons I think) and then we had this mad plan that they’d go to sleep early so sent them off at 7pm. I think Scarlett was asleep by about 10pm, Davies is hopefully asleep by now (11pm) so that was a roaring failure :lol:. I’ve been veering between feeling ok and feeling crap. I felt better for having been out and about and being busy but just sitting around had me feeling rubbish again, just generally cold, blah and ready for bed. The others all seem to be over it, coughs aside, so hopefully I’ll be on the up tomorrow.