Process not Product a guest post by Lisa of Little Coffee Beans

It is a great pleasure to welcome my first guest poster for Toddler Art Month, Lisa of Little Coffee Beans. I found Lisa via SouleMama and I'm glad I did because she always has fun things to talk about. She is here today to talk about the process of toddler art making. For toddlers it's all about the process and not the end product; where as for adults we are often to focused on the destination and over look the journey. How's that for a metaphor! Take it away Lisa.

These days there are many of us consciously raising families while trying to live artful lives. We do so by seeking and creating beauty from our everyday. Everything from how we place the food on our plates, to how we arrange our furniture and household items, how we dress ourselves and even how we interact with nature can all be approached artfully. I personally derive great satisfaction from the union between function and aesthetic; I want my kitchen tools to be as pleasing to the eye as they are useful. The same is true of my garden; I want it to be fruitful enough to feed my family and I also seek to create some semblance of visual beauty. As my daughter Zinnia grows, I'm starting to see these same tendencies in her. Maybe it’s the way she carefully arranges her blocks just-so. Or how she wants to pick out her own clothes in the morning. Or even how she decides which color to use on her chalkboard. It’s more than just her budding independence. I see a blooming artistic preference.

Living without the filters of predefined notions and a critical ego, toddlers see art in places where we may not. For them it's a process of creating, making, doing and arranging. And for them, it's all about the process. They’re not focused on making a print to proudly hang on the family art wall. At least not yet. For these little ones, what I think of as art-play, involves the ever-important process of mess making. It's the hands-on tactile smearing, rubbing, dribbling, smashing, clanking, don't-think-about-it-we'll-clean-later kind of mess making that toddlers seem to thrive on.

With that in mind, it seems that our role as parents/facilitators/guides centers around the practice of "letting go" so that these beautiful messes can fully embody our little ones' creativity. Like most toddlers, Zinnia loves to make a mess. It seems like that's where all the greatest neural connections are made. Foul moods are tempered (hers and mine) and spirits are lifted when we can dive into big creative messes without a thought of who’s cleaning up.

“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once [one] grows up.” ~ Pablo Picasso

Fortunately, in my experience, toddlers aren't too picky about art supplies. They can be just as creative with dirt to scoop as they are with crayons to scribble with, paint (or heck, even yogurt) to smear or rocks to clank out a melody. All of these "supplies" seem to elicit the same intrinsic aspects of art making.

With Zinnia’s help, I buy pre-loved crayons by the bag-full from the thrift store, pick up sidewalk chalk when I see it on sale, and buy all natural finger paints from Clementine. For daily art-play we have a chalkboard mounted on the wall in our main living area. This allows Zinnia to draw whenever she’s inspired to do so, in a critique-free, unsupervised environment. When I’m feeling more inclined to be involved with set-up and clean-up I get out the Clementine finger paints. I lie out a few bowls of color along with paintbrushes and let her at it. She dips and swirls and smears, getting lost in the process of creating. And as for the finished paintings, they often will get shipped in a family member’s birthday card, used to wrap a small gift or I will hang one or two of them on the wall for a pop of color.

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.” ~Ray Bradbury

Realizing that art-play is more than a tactile and visual experience that goes beyond crayons and finger paint, I decided to incorporate new materials on a recent cold and windy day. I gave Zinnia a serving platter with a handful of small pebbles. Like most of her art-play, I was curious what would happen with no guidance from me. As I sat back watching, she ever-so-gently started inspecting one rock at a time. This soon turned into picking up a handful at a time. Then they started dropping.  One by one. Clink. Clink. Clink. Soon a new experiential game was born and this tray of pebbles became a melody of dropping, clinking, mess making.

She proceeded to create shapes and arrange piles with the pebbles, all the while talking to herself, as if creating an elaborate story. Weeks later she came to me asking, “Mama, peeebles?” So out they came once again for more art-play.

(A note on safety: Zinnia is not one to put little things in her mouth so she was fine to be playing with pebbles this small. Please supervise children with small objects or anything that might be a choking hazard).

“The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” ~Henry David Thoreau

All the senses become involved when we move outside to explore and experience the natural world. The idea of children finding their own artistic inspiration and materials in nature is fascinating. Instead of introducing Zinnia to art “supplies,” she is given the opportunity to seek them out herself.

Recently, I watched in wonder as she ever-so-quietly started making piles of dirt on the garden border. It wasn't until I noticed a pattern in what she was doing that I really started to pay attention. Singing as she worked, she’d make a small pile of dirt then gently lay a rock on top. A moment would go by and the rock on top would be adjusted to just-the-right-spot. She would quietly stand back, taking in her work, then she’d be off in search of another rock.

The search for rocks was not at all random. She took her time, picking up and discarding a few until she found the perfect one. Then back to the garden border she would go to make a new little nest. This went on for twenty or so minutes until her work was deemed finished and then, just like Tibetan monks creating intricate sand mandalas, she kicked and swept away all evidence of her creation.

It goes without saying that we have a lot to learn from our children: patience, going-with-the-flow, and living in the present are three that are on the top of my list right now. And in terms of art-play, I’m learning to let go of outcomes and beginning to create simply for the pleasure of creating - thanks to Zinnia. Imagine the possibilities when we allow our creative energies the space and freedom to experiment with unconventional materials, without judgment of good and bad, and without the needy strings of attachment.  We might just experience true art-play alongside our little ones. And we could even start to enjoy the mess making as much as they do.

And wouldn’t that be a hoot?

Thank you so much for being here today. You can read more from Lisa on her blog Little Coffee Beans or follow her on Twitter @lilcoffeebeans