MARK MY WORD: A LITTLE DAB WILL DO YOU WHEN IT COMES TO BUDDING ARTISTS

Our driveway is a perpetual canvas in the summer.

Becca and Bailey love to decorate the concrete pavement with their chalk drawings, everything from stick-figure girls to flowers and balloons.

Five-year-old Bailey loves to draw happy rainbows with her array of colored chalk.

As a dad, there's nothing that makes me smile more than to come home from work and find our driveway covered with chalk paintings.

These aren't the work of some accomplished sidewalk artist like Mary Poppins' Bert. These are the drawings of children who aren't looking to pop through pictures, although I'm sure they'd be happy to do so if they could.

For Becca and Bailey and their friends, it's the act of drawing that's fun.

Becca and Bailey once drew their view of the city, featuring several houses, streets and, of course, the mall.

Girls take to shopping at an early age.

The great thing about driveway art is that you can always find room for a new creation. Unlike museum art, these works are fleeting. Rain, car tires and the summer sun all wear away at the chalk drawings. What was a work of art one day is just a memory the next.

It's also better than drawing on the walls in the house, although that occurred occasionally when the girls were younger.

When I was growing up in St. Louis County, I didn't have a concrete canvas. My house had a gravel driveway, which was a great place to play with my orange road grader. I graded and regraded whole sections of the driveway. But drawing chalk paintings was out of the question.

Still, I grew up around art. My dad painted watercolors as a hobby. Many of them still hang in my parents' house and in our home.

I didn't inherit the painting skills. But that doesn't matter to my kids. They were excited the other day when I brought out some old paintings I had done as a child.

They liked my drawings of horses and one of an Indian doll. One large painting features several houses, clearly out of perspective, on a yellow and green meadow.

I hadn't looked at it in years. My mother had saved my drawings and recently gave them back to me.

The kids loved them because their dad painted them, never mind the imperfect perspective, the crude lines and the poor brush strokes.

Well, actually, Bailey did notice my less than stellar art. "You got out of the lines," she said while viewing my watercolor of Davy Crockett, apparently stuck on top of a tree (that perspective thing again) and two Indians.

At age 9, Becca already can draw better than I ever could. In art class this spring, she learned about impressionist paintings.

She and her fellow third graders did their own impressionist painting. She proudly brought home her landscape painting, full of splotches of green, yellow, brown and blue.

She said it was "dab" art. Until then, I never had thought of Monet and Renoir as dab artists.

It's amazing what parents can learn from their children.

Our kids' construction-paper art, drawings and other assorted work continue to pile up. We've run out of room on the refrigerator door and a wall of the dining room and even in the upstairs hope chest. We'll save them and present a packet of their childhood art when they have children of their own.

But we've still got plenty of room on the driveway for chalk paintings, provided I don't park the car there.

Sometimes you just have to make room for art. And yes, a little dab will do you.

Mark Bliss is a Southeast Missourian staff writer.