Never Too Young To Start
-by Vatcharaporn Plewtianyingthawee, Thailand
3 year old Dhanat Plewtianyingthawee with one of his greeting cards
The whole story started at the end of September 2005 when my little 3 years old boy and I went shopping in Geneva, Switzerland and bought a box of 40-color set of Caran d'Ache Neocolor ll. After coming back to my home country, Thailand, my boy remembered the box filled with those colorful crayons and asked whether he could play with them. I allowed him to and we had fun testing them together. At that time, we did nothing special but scratched and drew some of his favorite subjects together. However, over time his paintings have changed to beautiful abstracts.
Artist at Work
After he filled the whole watercolor paper with colors, it was a great fun for him to paint with water using various techniques I taught him like drip, drop, splash, sprinkle, and many more. To his and my surprise, the output was far better than expected. Who would expect a 3 years old kid to accomplish such beautiful artistic abstracts?
Seeing those beautiful papers, I decided to crop, cut into small square pieces, design the front and back of the card, make original handmade one-of-a-kind greeting cards and started selling them.
These cards have one-of-a-kind artwork on the front and his photo on the back. None of them is the same because each piece is original. (The samples were done by scanning. The real ones are more brilliant with beautiful transition of mingling colors and subtle effects.)
Back of Card
Within a couple weeks, almost one thousand cards have been ordered and sold already. The orders didn't come by one or two or dozens but a hundred or two. Needless to say how proud my son is to see his works become real and usable in adult's world. Some cases he presented and sold his own works. His ability at 3 years old has impressed many people.
The cards have been widespread even to a TV program producer, so we got contacted to have a shooting of the young artist working on his painting. On the shooting day, he did a good job, very co-operative, organized, and ran the show by all by himself throughout the shooting time of almost one and a half hours without any supervision needed. It just flowed naturally.
The program called 'Family Circle' opened with an introduction of the little artist, Dhanat Plewtianyingthawee, and his parents. Then, I was interviewed about how I supported my son's ability in arts, how I viewed his works and thought they were worth making greeting cards and how I started to sell them. In the TV program, along with my narrated voice, my boy showed how he drew and painted with the water-soluble oil pastels together with his creativities to manage the beauty of color.
The best thing that makes us happy about this project aside of my boy starting having his saving account at the bank is that all our customers, after receiving their order, exclaimed with excitement and happiness that his works are more beautiful than expected from what they saw on computer screen.