Drawing is one of those things that I wish I had spent more time doing as a kid. Why didn’t my mother encourage me to draw more? Well, she knows just about everything, but didn’t realize how truly important drawing skills can be, and that when we nurture drawing confidence in a child, those skills can certainly be helpful in so many ways as as adult!
So that said, I’ve been recently pondering how to help my two young sons make drawing a greater part of their life. They almost never draw in school, it’s all coloring, and so because I never specifically encouraged drawing at home, well, sadly enough their skills are quite lacking given their ages and that they are being raised in a creative environment. Depressing really! So, it finally occurred to me, that since I believe that basic drawing skills are so very important, I need to do something about it. And the best way to start is to simply start drawing, and getting comfortable with the fact that everything we draw doesn’t have to be perfect!
So I’ve started a “building drawing confidence bootcamp” with my kids. This simply entails sitting down together almost everyday with paper and crayons or pens and drawing something together. This is done for a minimum of ten to fifteen minutes before I let them run out the door. (With the hope that we’ll be able to do longer sessions once everyone learns to enjoy drawing.) The drawings shown here were done say on the fourth time we’ve sat down to draw together, and even the child who was the most resistant initially was even happy to offer suggestions about what we should draw!
Lesson: Fill a piece of paper with a horizontal pattern in two colors. Simple enough right? And yet two of my kids struggled with what to draw, while the one who’s more cerebral and less artistic actually had no problem figuring this one out!
I’ll try to post the most successful of our exercises for those who’d like to try this with their kids. I’d say you have nothing to loose and wonderful things to gain!
Oh, and by the way, that’s my version on the upper left, but you probably figured that out, right?
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