Walker Family Folk Art

By popular request, I am dedicating this post to a funky piece of artwork we did as a family a few Thanksgivings ago when we were all together. It happens to show up in various photos I take, and I always receive questions about it. One of my readers is planning to do something similar (go Kelly!), so I finally decided it might be fun to share the process with you. It turned out to be a very fun project.

I will say though, that at first my family was not at all enthused with the idea of painting their own self portraits. In fact, if I were completely honest, I would have to say they pitched a fit about it. Babies. I had never done one either - the point was to have *fun* with it and to see what everyone came up with. Perfection was not the goal - in fact, what fun would that have been? So after some cajoling, everyone picked a square and took turns painting over the weekend.

*I've had several requests both on and offline to share more details of what products I used. I used a 24x36 stretched art canvas - no staples in the sides - 3/4" thick. I wanted it thicker - I usually use 1 3/4" thick - but I was out of town and the store was limited. I like the thicker canvases because they look great unframed. I recently noticed even Michael's has started carrying thick canvases (finally!). As for the paints, the are all acrylic, which is by far the easiest medium! Easily cleans up w/ soap & water, and comes in every color possible. You can find acrylic paints almost anywhere, and it's totally up to you what direction you want to go - all brights, all primaries, all pastels, keep everything realistic... endless choices. We used an array of different sized brushes - larger ones to paint the squares, smaller ones for hair and clothes, tiny ones for detail work like eyes and mouthes. For the writing, I used a fine metallic paint pen - those can be really tricky (splat!) so make sure you have a smooth, reliable one before you start! Well... I think that's everything... if you have more questions, don't be shy!

Here is my darling niece Kaylee - one of the first brave souls to try her hand at painting her self portrait. She was awesome :) In fact, it was really fun to see everyone starting to have genuine fun with our project. And the more they painted, the more their personality came out.
Good 'ol Uncle Fred - Kaylee's dad and my husband John's brother. He was a great sport as well, and did a terrific job with his personal addition. One thing I noticed was that Fred's family chose squares all connected, while my family members were all over the place. Hmmm....... ;)
My college boy Danny. I needed to make sure he did his square before he took off again and we didn't see him until Christmas! Another thing I made sure everyone did was add just a little symbol or something special about them (for Danny is was the blue & white stripes from the Argentine flag, as he had spent 2 years in Argentina) - and I had everyone sign their name as well.
You can see that we got about half of it done during Thanksgiving before we left for home. I didn't get a pic of my sis-in-law Dianne painting, but she did an amazing job AND painted their adorable dogs too! She was surprised she could paint like that - we were all totally impressed! But I still had a lot of work yet to do after I returned home, and 2 more boys to beat into submission to get them to paint their portraits............
It came along little by little. I filled in a few squares with things we love, like my red Bug and my husband's guitar, and several squares with mini versions of my colorful spatula paintings. My only regret was that our family wasn't bigger so we could have had more people participate. I think it would have added even more personality to see all the different faces and pets. But our family already has quite a bit of both, so maybe I should just be grateful for what we have :)
It took me a while to decide on what to put in the 2 black squares, so they definitely came last. For the first, I decided on part of the dedicatory prayer for one of our Temples actually. But I took liberties with it, adding some of my own things I wanted our house to have in it. For the second black square, I decided to list the address of every home we have lived in during our married life. I was really happy with how both squares turned out.
Does anyone else think my husband John looks like Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine???
Fred and his family in the lower right corner :) And my in-laws did the pumpkin. Long story.

and I didn't even say anything about diet Coke or Ruffles :)

So anyway........ that's the story folks :)

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Now this piece of art, on the other hand (get it?)... is a whoooooole different story. It's one of my all-time favorite pieces of art on earth. But... I'll save it for another time, of course :)