Finger-painting

The Little Artist was here yesterday and made a picture for her Uncle Kurt for his birthday. The first one was for "practice" and became a big swirl of mud as she moved the colors vigorously in circles with the palms of both hands. This paint was runnier than we've used before and I don't like it. Also, the colors aren't very bright--the red is almost orange. We encouraged her to use her fingers instead of her whole hand for the next one and that worked much better. She spread the colors and made marks in them with her fingers. For her masterpiece I told her she could put her finger in the paint jar to get the color, so she drew circles and dots, then squished her hands in the paint and made handprints--her favorite, especially the one where she stuck all of her fingertips in the blue-paint jar and printed on top of her handprint.