Artist Joins Forces with Four-Year-Old Daughter to Create Whimsical Portraits

Behold a mystical race of Golden Age Hollywood stars-come-slug people. Springing from the allied imaginations of a mother-daughter duo, these hand-drawn portraits ingeniously wed the most mesmeric of faces to the most spazzy of Tyrannosaurus Rex stump arms.

Proving that great and surprising art is often born from unlikely collaborations, illustrator Mica Angela Hendricks initiated the project in an accidental kind of way because her four-year-old always sets her beady eyes on her mum's luxe art supplies. When Hendricks recently tried to reserve a flashy new sketchbook for her own use, her crafty daughter Myla retaliated by appropriating classic mummy-language: "If you can't share, we might have to take it away if you can't share." Reluctantly, Hendricks allowed the wily kid to add a body to the elegant female head she'd just drawn. The result, a magnificent dino-woman, is rightly described by Hendricks on her blog as "carefree".

A series of mother-daughter collabs followed, creating a funny little world of amoebic slugs and astronaut beavers with high-society noggins which somehow come across as believable beings. (I am fondly reminded of a young nephew who once claimed he had an imaginary friend called 'Prawn-Egg' with "the head of a prawn and the body of an egg". It would be great to see that illustrated.) 

Hendricks' blog post about the project reveals the amusing creative competitiveness between Myla and her, and how the activity has taught her to be less rigid in creative undertakings: "Yes, some things (like my new sketchbook) are sacred, but if you let go of those chains, new and wonderful things can happen. Those things you hold so dear cannot change and grow and expand unless you loosen your grip on them a little ... Most importantly, I learned that if you have a preconceived notion of how something should be, YOU WILL ALWAYS BE DISAPPOINTED. Instead, just go with it, just ACCEPT it, because usually something even more wonderful will come out of it."

The logical next step would be to invent backstories for these characters with details supplied by both artists, to produce a very original book that would inspire kids and adult artists alike.

See more of Mica and Myla's images on Mica's blog.

Via Colossal.