THE ART OF LETTING CHILDREN BE CREATIVE

Parents sometimes need to be shown how to let their children be creative, art teacher Lisa Bishop says.

Parents aren't letting their children be creative if they remind them that skies are supposed to be blue or lines are meant to be colored inside.

"Parents tend to overload their children with information and children get very frustrated," Bishop said. "When they get frustrated they turn it all off ... It's a more creative approach if children can use their imaginations."

Her task Saturday afternoon at the Franklin School cafeteria was to introduce 22 children and parents to the difficult medium of watercolor. The class was the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri's final Families and the Arts program of the year.

Her first instruction to the children and parents was simply to play with the brushes, the paint and the water.

Admitting up front that watercolor isn't her preferred medium, Bishop said the difficulty of controlling the combination of paint, water and the paper can be baffling.

Watercolors reward spontaneity, she said.

She showed them one of her own watercolors -- "a mistake I made that was much better than anything I could have planned."

Monica Waldon's 5-year-old daughter, Harlie, wound up with a bat, a cat, a hamster and a monster in her first watercolor.

"I didn't really know I was going to make all this," she told her mother.

Harlie's friend Lessley Dennington became momentarily flustered. "Oh man, I messed up," she said.

"We're just practicing right now," Harlie reminded her.

Allowing colors to run together is part of the technique of painting with watercolors, Bishop reminded them.

Using paper with a higher rag content increases the artist's control. But, as Tonia Lane said, "Now I have to know what I'm doing." Lane's 9-year-old daughter, Juneall, painted a sunrise even more colorful than her fingernails.

Bishop is married to Southeast art professor Sam Bishop, who had cautioned her that younger children might get frustrated with watercolors. But that didn't seem to happen Saturday afternoon -- at least not with the children.

Steve Trautwein, a biology professor at Southeast, carefully painted a fireplace.

"I like nice edges," he said. "This is a real challenge."

Trautwein accompanied his two daughters, Carly, 10, and Janna, 7, along with their neighbor Jonathan Hayward, 11, to the class..

The children -- particularly Jonathan -- were blending colors together much more fancifully, but Trautwein's daughters liked his paintings. "You're a genius," Carly said.

"Remember you said that when you're a teen-ager," he said.