(staccato music) - Hi.

My name is Alex Chiu.

I am a painter and muralist.

The pandemic has changed our lives a lot.

The biggest challenge that we have is childcare.

We have two daughters right now.

We have a five-year-old who's in kindergarten.

And we have a one-year-old toddler, who's walking and learning how to talk and stuff like that.

(babbling) We split parenting between me and my wife, I'm still trying to do mural projects, but they're all in the design phase right now.

(drumming) A lot of the challenges of being home are figuring out what to do with the kids.

(blowing sound) - Whew!

Bubbles!

- [Alex] One of the projects we did was painting a mural in my living room.

It's an image of two koi fish and they look like they're floating on top of the wall a little bit.

It's just something that I wanted to do to, one, feel like I'm being productive and to keep my chops up with painting, but it's also something that's gonna be around in our house for a while.

And it's something that, when people visit, they can appreciate.

And it kind of makes the house feel a little bit more lived in and it has a little bit more of our own personality.

Looks good, Mazzy.

Mazzy's been doing these drawing videos.

Her kindergarten teacher sent us some educational links to click on.

Some of what she does every day is these step-by-step drawings.

- This time a whole pile goes at a time.

- [Alex] So she drew some characters from Elsa and the Trolls movie and we took those and then made them into paper puppets and she made her own animation.

♪ Let it go ♪ ♪ Let it go ♪ ♪ I am one with the wind a sky ♪ ♪ Let it go ♪ ♪ Let it go ♪ - [Mezzie] Hi guys, hi guys.

- [Alex] For me, it's really nice to be able to pass along this idea that they're allowed to be creative, and to give them the space to do that, where it's something that's a regular part of their life.

Where they can express themselves and create their own unique styles and learn some new skills.

- No smashing it down, I can do it myself.

- Sometimes I feel like I'm too busy to be able to interact with my kids in a way where it would make sense for me to paint with them and draw with them.

But this quarantine has actually given me a real chance to do that and it's been fun and I think that we're gonna remember this.