My kid wishes to learn painting. Where do I start?

Many parents work with their preschoolers on learning letters, reading books and even incorporating math skills into daily life.

These skills and activities are necessary and beneficial to your preschooler but by adding creative play and activities (like painting) you will help the overall growth of your child’s whole brain.

6 Reasons Why Kids Need to Paint

• Painting exercises your child’s brain. Creative activities like painting, use a different part of the brain than reading and or math. The right side of the brain is our creative half and responsible for visual skills and understanding what we see through our eyes (which is still developing at the preschool age).  Creative play and painting activities help exercise your child’s “right” brain leading to overall healthy brain development.
• Your child learns how to express their own feelings by transforming their own ideas and feelings onto paper.
• Painting builds self-esteem. By providing open-ended painting activities your child there is no right or wrong way to paint. The emphasis is on the process so every child feels successful no matter there skill level or developmental stage.
• Your child learns how to make decisions and problem solve. As your child works and paints they make choices about their own artwork.
• Painting helps relieve stress. Just like adults, preschoolers get stressed too. Painting is one way your child can de-stress and a healthy way to express their feelings.
• Painting helps develop muscle control.  Working with a brush or small tool helps develop fine motor skills (small muscle control). While working on large sheets of paper or at the easel helps develop large muscle control (Gross Motor skills). Painting also helps develop your child’s hand-eye coordination.
• Painting is a sensory experience. Your child is building a knowledge base of different sensory experiences, like how it feels to touch the paper with finger painting or how it feels to move the brush with your arm across the paper. Sensory experiences are important because it helps your child explore and understand the world around them.

Introducing painting lessons to children can be a great experience, and can encourage a child to pick-up painting who would never have the opportunity.

1. Consider Why Your kid Want to Take up Painting and What he/she Wants to Get out of It

Before you go out and buy all your new art supplies and start throwing paint onto the canvas, you should consider why exactly your kid want to take up painting and what he/she wants to get out of it.

Your answers will determine how you proceed and what you should focus on learning. I don’t believe that there is a static learning path that everyone must follow to master painting. Everyone has different tendencies, interests and natural skills which determine the optimal learning path they should take.

2. Preparations for painting

Prepare your workspace where it’s safe to make spills. Paint near running water stations. Being close to a bathroom or kitchen will be easier for clean-ups. Drop cloths help with spilt stains. Remember some paints may not come out as easy as other paints. Be prepared to explain where children can only paint. Express to children how you have prepared a workspace for the painting activity. Prepare workspace on sturdy flat surface children can easily workaround. Have available clean-up stations for paintbrush washing and spills.

3. Safe paints for kids

Only use child grade non-toxic safe paints. Never use adult grade paints with young children. Adult grade paints may have advanced instructions young children will not be able to follow. Some adult grade paints may have chemicals that are not safe for small children.

Always paint in a well-ventilated space with windows or doors.

4. Allow children to explore painting

Provide projects that are more exploring with fun experimenting. Young children need plenty of time to learn how paint works and what its possibilities are. Do not expect young children to start painting realistic pictures or be able to copy paintings. Your projects should be fun and open to their ideas and experiments.

5. Pick Your Medium (Acrylics, Oils or Watercolors)

Next, you should decide on a medium to focus on, at least for the short term. This will allow you to really get a feel for how the medium works, so that you can then pay more attention to the big-picture aspects of painting, like colour, composition, value, etc.

The major choices are oils, acrylics and watercolours. There are some other options, like gouache and water-mixable oils, but I won’t touch on these in this guide.

Painting Surfaces

Great surfaces to paint are; paper, cardboard, recycled cardboard, watercolour paper, canvas, rocks and wood surfaces.

Get Your Supplies

It’s time to stock up on art supplies. But make sure you read all of this section first before you start buying every type of brush or every colour of paint – you do not actually need that much stuff!

The supplies you get will vary depending on the medium you decide to go with. In a broad sense, all you need is:

An easel to hold your artwork;

Canvas (for acrylic or oil painters) or paper (for watercolour painters);

A palette for colour mixing;

Brushes (suitable for your chosen medium);

Palette knives;

Paints;

Solvent (if oil painting); and

Paper towels (for wiping your brush between strokes).

8. Enrol kids in online classes of art:  

Nowadays with the advancement of technology, one can get any information on the internet. There is number of online apps and websites from where your kids can learn art, craft or any other such activities. 

Tip: Be proud of your first artworks, even if they do not turn out as planned. One day, you will look back and see how far you have come.  

Also, don’t compare your first few paintings to the works of other artists. Most people do not share their early or failed works; you only see their best.

Creating a painting encourages thought into the choice of color, patterns and designs. Your child develops his brain by capturing objects in a painted representation and exploring complex techniques as he develops his skills. This gives him a continued challenge as he tries different painting activities. As your child learns to paint and improves her technique, she gains greater confidence in her developed skills. Painting gives your child a way to express himself emotionally. If he feels stressed about a situation, his painting might hint at those feelings.

Happy painting!