Portrait of a 3 year old

I am so in love with this portrait that Emma made today! Well yes I did help her a bit, but we'll get to that in a moment. First, THIS was our inspiration. I love pinterest and Emma loves hovering over my shoulder, so when she saw that picture, she asked me if she could make one like that of herself and I jumped right up from the couch to get our painting gear ready. Please don't mind the blurry pictures that I took with my phone, it's like a second nature that phone nowadays that I've totally forgotten what a normal camera looks like.

I'm always beating myself up when I try to direct the way she is creating her art, but this time I thought that it might be fun to make it together. Help her where she wants/needs help and just enjoy the time that we are painting together. This attitude adjustment was all I needed and we had so much fun, in the end I realised she did most of it on her own anyway. But just to be clear with you all, I'll tell you what my role was, aka what I did and what's all her.

 We started out by painting the head; she did that all by herself. I made the neck and the outline of her shirt as her drawing level is not there yet, she then coloured them in. She also painted the eyes and asked me to draw the mouth as she wanted it to be like in the picture.

We used acrylic paints for the whole picture, but for the hair I gave her cups with a very little water and she mixed some paint in them. I helped her in dropping some of the watery paint mixture around the face and she blew through a straw to make funny hair.

Above is what the picture looked like after she was done with the paint. I gave her a marker and asked her to draw the nose and the eyebrows. Then I went around the eyes, the mouth and the head with the marker. Below is the finished picture.

I think this picture will be framed for a very long time. It was so much fun to do and she is so proud of what she's created. If you look at the picture at the very top you'll see photo where she is about one month old. I can't believe 3 and a half years later I have a picture next to that photo made by that little baby girl. How amazing are these little people, how much talent there is, it all blows me away. And wow how truthful that self portrait is of her, so much attitude and craziness and I am so lucky to be able to be part of her world everyday. Bless you little artist.