Lockdown Art With Kids - Creating Henry Finch

With the threat of imminent lockdown hanging over our heads here in Scotland and in many places where it has actually happened, I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit some ways to entertain the kids when trapped in a house with them for long periods at a time.

I like to do art things with my daughter and sometimes inspiration can come from the most unexpected of places.

The little lady had bought me over one of her new Christmas books. It was quite a cool one.

It was called I Am Henry Finch.

It's all about a Finch among a flock of finches who begins to think for himself and in doing so saves his flock from a terrible beast who has been eating them all.

It's very funny and like the best of kids books is quite clever and thought provoking.

The little lady was looking at the artwork. All of the finches are made up of red thumbprints.

How do they get such big thumbs to make the thumbprints?

She asked.

Well, that's easy. They will just do it digitally.

Said I, like a daftie, expecting her to accept this.

What do you mean, digitally?

And so, I decided to show her. It is actually quite easy but also quite cool.

You get a thumbprint, I got mine from pixabay. Best to get a .PNG on a transparent background.

Use any old art/photo manipulation software to change it to the colour red. In this case I was using my phone so used an app called PicSay Pro.

To change the colour, I used the colour blend function.

^{use this one of you like!}

Then you insert them to a blank canvas, making them large or small and from there you just draw a crude pair of legs, a beak and a wing or two.

And that's it! Finch fun!

We had lots of fun for the rest of the afternoon and I can highly recommend it!

_{her attempt at recreating the cover, pretty good!}

The only downside is that your clever offspring might then demand a decent tablet to draw on instead of the cheap shanner that she had previously been happy with.

Oh well, stay safe everyone!