three sisters garden, painting (day 5)

We wrapped up our first week in our planting block with a painting, and a story ("The Corn Spirit" from the book Keepers of Life by Michael J. Caduto and Joseph Bruchac). Here's how we did the paintings in case anyone is looking for inspiration with this:


We started out doing a wash of the entire page in yellow, while I said "It was a perfect week to begin work on our Three Sisters garden. The sun was shining a bright, warm yellow, and it filled the sky with it's glow." Then we washed over the yellow with cobalt blue, while I said "The sky was so blue, the green, green grass grew up to meet it. (Of course, this resulted in a completely green page -- the color in the photos are slightly off.) "The first thing we needed to do to start our garden was to till up the soil." We loaded our brushed with Prussian blue, and painted in straight lines across the center of the page, leaving a margin of green all around, while I said "We hired a very nice man to come with his rototiller, and he turned over the sod for us and made us a place to plant a garden. We were thankful to have this man and his machine, because digging up all that grass by hand like the Haudenosaunee did would have been very hard work."


Then we dipped our brushes in the orange, and mixed it into the Prussian blue already on the page to make brown, while I said "We went to the pasture and dug up some nice, dark, organic soil to mix into our newly turned over earth." Then we picked up the Prussian blue again, and in a circular motion, made 12 circles in the garden square (that's how many mounds we have in our garden) while I said "We raked the soil into mounds, so that we would have little hills in which to plant our corn." Then with a small dry brush, we took away four spots of paint in each of the mounds, while I said "With a planting stick, we made four holes in each mound, one to the North, one to the South, one to the East, and one to the West, so that there would be space to plant our corn." Then we picked up some thick gold paint with the tip of the small brush, and "planted" a kernel of corn in each hole, while I said "When all was ready, we dropped our corn kernels into our holes, and our garden was ready for the rain and the sun to take over."

The top painting is mine, the middle is J's, and the bottom is Zoo Boy's. And yes, I'm very impressed with myself that I came up with this idea, it's hard to imagine that I used to be afraid of painting....