Not Pollock, but maybe Picasso??

So, as you may have noticed, no Jackson Pollock-type images have appeared, despite my best laid plans. It seems the interest waned pretty quickly and I was back to a familiar dilemma; whether to lead the activity onwards or let it be. The upside of the former is that, as long as I don't become too dictatorial over the whole thing (and there are no guarantees of that!) there is a chance we'd spend a couple of hours quite productively, J and B may well enjoy something they didn't expect to enjoy and we'd have a piece of artwork to show for it. Plus a pretty good blog topic! On the other hand, I was really hoping that at least one child would have been keen enough to have a go themselves. I get tired of feeling I have to initiate everything and one of the benefits of home education is that children have much more opportunity to develop the skills of self-reliance and self-motivation, rather than being spoon-fed an inflexible one-size-doesn't-fit-all national curriculum for hours.

It would be unfair of me to suggest that my lot are sitting around waiting for me to come and bestow my ladle of knowledge though. They do plenty of their own activities; photography and cooking are two current favourites. But these take up only a small portion of their non-academic time and in filling the rest of the day we seem to differ in our opinions of how much Xbox time can be considered reasonable!

So, I'm still on a quest to find soul-filling and enjoyable art and craft activities for teenagers. Not easy. Granted, I have only had a quick Google, but there seems to be an awful lot of bookmark, friendship bracelet and decorate-your-flip-flop type projects which elicit looks that seem to say 'Mum, we're not living in an Enid Blyton book. We're a lot more sophisticated these days and it's going to take more than that.' Sigh.

I did have a minor brainwave yesterday though which made use of about six months worth of Weekend Guardian magazines which have taken up residence in the living room. See, it wasn't clutter and I shouldn't have tidied them away, so there! We went through them and cut out random facial features then selected the most interesting combination of eyes, mouths and noses to create collages. They have a bit of the Picasso about them, don't you think??

And the Jackson Pollock? I think I'm going to let that one go. I might drop the occasional hint though and see what happens :)