Carter is a wild man in almost all areas.  His personality is just bursting out of his little body.  One thing I’ve noticed is that his coloring is also wild, to match his personality.  He mainly just scribbles.  Like, he can fill up an entire page with scribbles.  I have a masterpiece hanging on my fridge right now that is a nice sheet of computer paper full of purple. . . and underneath the purple, I can see a few random scribbles of yellow and blue.  He also likes to just use black and brown–and the little pieces of crayon that are broken, with no wrapper (which I think I’ve mentioned before in a post).  I was trying to think back to when Brayden was his age, and I thought I remembered him being a little more ahead in the coloring area.  But now that I see Brayden’s current love for all things art, I guess that doesn’t surprise me.  So I did a little study with pictures.  Yesterday, I gave Carter a little drawing lesson.  I tried to show him how to make a stick person.  And some balloons.  The whole thing made me laugh.  He really got a kick out of it too, and giggled nearly the entire time I was trying to show him what to do.  It started off well, but then it ended in some more scribbles.  I think the problem is that he doesn’t know how to hold a crayon the right way, so he pretty much has no control over the direction that things are going.

See Exhibit A.

So I went through some of my old pictures and checked out Brayden’s “style”.  All of the images below were taken before Brayden was three, so he was younger than Carter in all of these.  He held his writing utensils correctly, and I’m not sure if that’s because I taught him how to do that, or because it was just natural.  Maybe he did a better job because we did more with him.  In the pictures, he’s painting with water, using markers, dry erase books, crayons, pencils, etc.  Other than coloring books, I’m not sure what else we’ve done with Carter.  It’s the poor second child syndrome.  Ah well. . . he excels in other things!

See Exhibit B.

Lesson learned from this post:  Do more variety with Carter!