What I have gotten myself into this time.

Luke's school auction. I volunteered to be the auction person for his class... I had a brilliant idea earlier, a big painting with their hands with hearts in the hands. The kids could paint them, it would be sweet. And easy. And beautiful. Then my mother thought it would be good to have my grandmother involved and at Thanksgiving dinner suggested she make some fiber art with the kids hands. Oh, ok. That would be great. So I traced the kids hands and mailed them off to her and she mailed be back two big wall hangings with hands. Well, we still wanted to do something the kids could have some involvement in... and now we kinda had more than enough hands... so I had to come up with something different. Still a painting... but what. Since they had been studying John Audubon and everyone loves birds... we decided to do a bird theme.

I went into the class room last week and had the kids draw me bird pictures. I'd been planning on putting them on the canvas with different colored backgrounds in each square - one section for each kid. But they didn't follow directions very well and the birds are all different sizes... and so I'm thinking the squares thing isn't going to work very well - some kid is going to have a 12 inch square and anther would have a 4 inch square. Not fair.



So I've been messing around with a layout. Some kids drew extra things like trees, clouds, flowers... eggs... nests... a fence... and so I decided to make it more like a big kid's drawing with a tree with brances, a fence, flowers, clouds, a sun. One bird sits on top of the tree (that's Luke's, it's an eagle, very Picasso, don't you think?) and then birds everywhere. I tried to make them fit where they would go and then just started sticking them in where they would fit.

So now I've got this huge canvas covered with tracings of the kid's drawings. And I'm not sure what to do next. I guess I could cut the original drawings out and gel them to the canvas and paint over, around and on top of them? Or I could figure out how to transfer the tracings to the canvas another way? Or? Not sure. I wanted to bring the drawings back in and have the kids paint them. I'd like to bring the canvas in and have them paint on there, but that makes me really nervous, one crazy kid with a paintbrush and the whole thing could be ruined. Any suggestions from my artsy readers?