Five Ways to Build Your Kid’s Confidence Through Art these Christmas Holidays

Art is a natural obsession for children as soon as they can grasp a crayon and scrawl on your wall but how can YOU use their inner genius to improve your home décor and their sense of self-worth and outer confidence?

As a customised Artwork Specialist, here are my 5 tips:

1. Make it big: Children bring home school or art classes all the time but in my experience, it’s rare that they brag about it. So, find a deserving wall, measure its proportions and buy a canvas to match its proportion and scale. Here’s the rule: big spaces need bigger shapes, bolder colours and tones; smaller spaces need smaller shapes of bright colour.

2. Make it quality: Quality makes enormous difference to art. A lesser quality canvas makes paints look shoddy no matter what, so invest in custom-made, which is my preference every time, or go to the art store and buy the dearest brand. Invest in professional acrylics; I use Atelier Interactive myself, not school grade and you’ll get true colour with a long lasting, UV Stable, semi gloss finish. You always get what you pay for when it comes the materials in art and yes, get it framed!

3. Paint it in your décor colours: Paint your artwork with your kids in the colours sampled from your room. Add white (tinting), grey (toning) and black (shading) to your colours to make your space more sophisticated and exciting.

4. Use different tools: Kids will ask for constant change of colour and tool. Change your colours too randomly during the painting process and you’ll end up with a mess but you can change tools to achieve varying marks from tooth brushes, giant and small brushes, sponges, rag, sticks and fingers for an interactive days fun!

5. Let them sign it! For kids as young as 18 months old, I like them to sign their artwork with their hand print while older children can write their name. If your artwork is successful and others love it, you will be amazed at how frequently they will drag visitors to the precious location and proudly show off their masterpiece and signature.

This is theirs, they created it and it’s an excellent confidence booster that, done right, might become a family heirloom and even, grace their adult home years from now, still look great and have relevance… and that’s really what this is all about. So design your artwork from the start to create relevance down the track and your hard work will always be loved.

By Sharron Tancred, Customised Artwork Specialist.