artist turns her daughter's doodles into watercolor works

artist turns her daughter’s doodles into watercolor works
all images courtesy of ruth oosterman

in collaboration with her two-year-old toddler eve, ruth oosterman has painted a series of vibrantly colored watercolors, using her child’s doodles as the final artwork’s framework. with a black ink pen, eve has drawn dissected strokes and simple abstract geometries onto a sheet of paper, marked on the page with the liberation and lack of inhibition inherent in young minds. with these etchings acting as a sort of compositional structure, oosterman has envisioned what could lie in-between the lines and has illustrated the hidden picture within the scribbles.

playful and surreal images from the ‘elephant king’, a giant purple creature bearing a golden crown, and ‘the lady and the fox’, a red-headed woman wearing an animal-like hairpiece, are brought out through the speedy use of watercolor paint, keeping the original work, she describes ‘simple and true’. oosterman describes, ‘just as my painting forms, I make sure to follow her outlines and leave some of her drawing visible, keeping it a collaboration. it is a fine balance that I am continuing to learn from.’

the toddler’s sketch is turned into ‘elephant king’

the great owl

the first collaboration with eve

a bookworm’s dream