Thanks to everyone who contributed to last month’s Mini- Masterpieces Link-up. There was a good selection of artwork and projects, including some wonderful robot artwork from Mermaids Creations, to a Halloween appropriate Spider resist artwork from Our Creative Day.

This month I am featuring my younger son’s own Halloween artwork. This is a Halloween scene apparently, with a black ghost, bats, pumpkins, and me (wearing a dress with a flower on – I also appear to have no hair!) Not sure why I’m there, but I think he drew me first, and then decided to make it into a Halloween picture afterwards!  Again like most of his projects these days, it was self-initiated – I just supply him with what he needs when he asks for it, or he helps himself. He always has very clear ideas about what he wants to do, so I suppose you could say that I act as his ‘studio assistant’. Or sometimes he sees what I am doing, and wants to join in – he especially likes to use Mummy’s art materials. As you can imagine, as he is only loosely supervised, the mess can be tremendous, but at least it is ‘contained’ mess, and it can all be cleared away again. He’s currently on a mission to create a veritable art gallery in his room, so that if he wakes up in the night and feels scared, he’ll see lots of lovely pictures. Of course there are already pictures on his walls, but I think it’s rather nice that he wants to create his own.

I am pleased that he likes to create, and am hoping that it will last  because my older son has now ‘moved on’ to his own things, and doesn’t spend a lot of time doing artwork these days. However I was worried/pleased in equal measure the other day when my younger son said to me ‘art is normally for girls, but I’m the boy who likes art’. I thought the statement that ‘art is for girls’ was horrifying, and of course I quickly tried to assure him that it was for boys too. I suppose the fact that he sees me doing it all the time doesn’t help in that respect, and as I have written about in an earlier post, so many creative toys and games are so obviously aimed at girls, much to my frustration, that perhaps it is not surprising if he has this misconception. I often wonder when this bias in society began and whether it is a fairly recent thing? Has anyone else noticed it?

Anyway, on to the Link-up. If you’ve been creative with your kids recently, or if they have produced any Mini-Masterpieces of their own, do add them below. And don’t forget, if you are on Flickr, you can also add your artwork (by children under 12) to the Artful Kids Flickr Group.