February 2, 2005 - Wednesday
Because Harry broke his plate this past weekend, I took the boys to a nearby paint-your-own pottery place. It's not a place to make pottery, per se, just paint it. Inside there are several tables in the middle surrounded by shelves of ready-made, but unpainted clay plates, bowls, mugs, animals, trays, crock pots, and other items and a good number of paint colors, brushes, sponges, stamps, stencils, and other painting supplies, all for kids and adults who want to be creative. A young lady explained how things worked and I asked about plates. Harry volunteered that he was going to make a new plate because he broke his old one, all in a surprisingly confident and earnest manner.

The painting went about as I might have expected with both boys immediately wanting to mix all the colors like they would on paper. However, the young lady had said that dark colors would obscure any lighter colors and that mixing was not such a good idea. Awkwardly, that was a difficult concept for the boys whose only experience with painting would tell them differently. I kept trying to say how the mixing wouldn't work as well with this type of painting, but it was difficult because they wouldn't see the results of for one week. Harry seemed to understand a little better and tried to worked with colors in separate areas, but Jeremy effectively created so much black mush in the middle of the plate that I decided to wash it off and have him try again. And, oh, what a pained decision. By washing it off would I be telling him that his "art" the first time was a failure? I suppose I could have just let him make a mess and leave it at that. It was only a $9 plate. But, I just couldn't. I wanted him to do something he might be happy with, but really it was just plain hard for me to watch him make such a mess. Of course, I heaped on the praise the second time when he more delicately dabbed his colors.


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