Mica Angela Hendricks - collaborating with a 4-year-old

While breaking in a new sketchbook one day, illustrator and graphic artist Mica Angela Hendricks' 4-year-old daughter decided that she wanted to get in on the action too. Hendricks complied, and a particularly fantastic collaboration was born.

Although Hendricks begins each work, she never knows how her daughter will complete the drawing. Hendricks starts with the head, and her daughter draws a body and some background details. Hendricks will then add color, highlights and textures, but the main details of each piece are all in the hands of the 4-year-old. As Hendricks explains of the collaboration:

Sometimes I would give her suggestions, like “maybe she could have a dragon body!”  but usually she would ignore theses suggestions if it didn’t fit in with what she already had in mind.  But since I am a grownup and a little bit (okay a lot) of a perfectionist, I sometimes would have a specific idea in mind as I doodled my heads.  Maybe she could make this into a bug!  I’d think happily to myself as I sketched, imagining the possibilities of what it could look like.  So later, when she’d doodle some crazy shape that seemed to go in some surrealistic direction, or put a large circle around the creature and filled the WHOLE THING in with marker, part of my brain would think, What is she DOING?!?  She’s just scribbling it all up!  But I should know that in most instances, kids’ imaginations way outweigh a grownup’s, and it always ALWAYS looked better that what I had imagined.  ALWAYS.

You can read more about this wonderful series on Hendrick's blog, with prints available through Society 6. 


(Via Colossal)