Not too long ago, professional illustrator Mica Angela Hendricks could not have imagined sharing her personal art projects with anyone. However, one day, when she bought a new sketchbook, her 4-year old daughter started adding her own contributions. Mica noticed that unrestrained imagination of a child allows her girl to finish the paintings in a way that the artist could never think of herself. Now the mom starts a piece by drawing a face, and the daughter finishes it up with the body she thinks to fit best. Mica never knows how they will turn out - which was tough for a perfectionist at first - but she learned to appreciate it:
"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," says Mica.
