Collage update -- the guest artist returns

In 2011 I wrote about a vacation with a five-year-old, how he was curious about my daily art project for that year and decided to adopt it for his own during our week at the beach.  Earlier this month I had the pleasure of spending time with him again -- now he's nine -- and again he was curious about my daily art project.  After watching me do my collage he wanted to do his own.

We both worked on the same "assignment" -- make a face by putting together parts from other images.  I was impressed that he was literally thinking outside the box, allowing the hair and beard to extend off the page.

The next day the assignment was to make a creature that was part human, part animal.

The next assignment was to find a scene, then put things of a different scale into it.  My daily collage showed a cow on the sofa, and his first one was also a living-room scene, but he quickly moved on to soccer, in the exciting final days of the World Cup.

I was so proud of his work, which I thought had sophistication you wouldn't expect from a nine-year-old.  For some time I've been flirting with the concept of collage "assignments" or "recipes" as a way to jump-start creativity, and this experience reinforces it.  If a kid can respond so brilliantly to a prompt, an adult might even be able to do the same.