A Creative Exercise in Patience

Today we did some painting for a Thanksgiving craft project. Matilda will usually last 5 minutes painting with a brush before she has to plunge her hands into the paint. The rest of the painting session then consists of her repeatedly dipping her hands into the paint, rubbing them back and forth to fully experience the texture on her fingers, repeating the hand-in-paint-plunge, with the occasional handprint/smear made on her paper.

Dipping:
 Lathering:

And repeat: 

Usually I let M follow her creative process more while painting. Her handprint technique always results in smearing all the paint colors together in the center of the paper until it is a uniform color and the paper is about to rip from being so soaked with paint. I am not sure why I expected today to be any different, but I was trying to encourage her to fill up the paper with color since I wanted to then cut the painted pages up for another purpose. In the end, the final product came out really nice so I feel bad for being so frustrated with M the whole time we were painting. Next painting session, no over-direction, I promise, and endless smearing handprints are fine.