Background

This summer I made a commitment to replace “Art Play” with art training. I felt that this was a very valuable part of a child’s education not just for the child’s personal satisfaction of being able to express himself artistically, but for several more practical reasons as well. First, art training teaches a person to observe the world as it is rather than as what he thinks it is. Second, it teaches discipline to follow a project to completion and to work within set limits to achieve a set objective. Third, it teaches your to actually draw -- a valuable skill in many career fields including the sciences (keeping lab and field notebooks, technical fields, drawing flowcharts and schematics), and business (creation of concept sketches for both products and the packaging and promotional materials that go with them). I am doing this program right alongside my son Alec since I’ve never had any more formal art training than the minimum required by PA state law -- one year in Jr. high School. Additionally, my participation modeled the willingness to learn, provided a valuable comparison between my art and my son’s, and gave me a hands-on gauge of difficulty to prevent me from assigning unrealistic work due to my ignorance.

We have several goals for our program. We are training our eyes and minds to see what is really there rather than what we "know" is there, we are exploring different art media/techniques, and we are improving our ability to draw.

I don't think that there's an upper age limit on this activity, I've been doing everything right along with Alec and Heidi, a young adult friend, has been joining the class when she's visiting. The lower limit would be based on a reasonable degree of coordination, the mental development to understand what we are trying to achieve, and the ability to focus for about 15-30 minutes on an interesting activity.

The supplies required are minimal, no more than you probably have around the house already if your kids do much art play. You need: a sketch pad (newsprint will do), ordinary # 2 pencils, colored pencils (splurge on the art quality ones here -- the inexpensive kind won’t make a really intense color and everything ends up looking washed out), crayons, markers, watercolors, and perhaps pastels and/or oil pastels.

We did a little bookwork the week before we began. We had a couple books on drawing out of the library and some books of classic art available. I just leafed through them with Alec at my side looking at the pictures and pointing out what little I knew about styles and artists. Just about anyone can readily distinguish among Egyptian Art, primitive cave art, Italian Renaissance, Dutch Masters, impressionism, and abstract art. (I defined abstract art as the artist not drawing what the object looks like but of drawing how he feels about it). This was very informal but it pays for you to do a little “homework” before you show the art books to the child.

Projects

Begin at the beginning:

Our first activity was drawing a few ordinary wooden blocks. Before beginning I explained that we would be trying to draw what we saw, not what we knew was there. I referenced the ancient Egyptians who always drew what they knew was there as compared to the Dutch Masters who very carefully drew exactly what they saw. We drew all the shapes we had -- square, rectangular, thin rectangular, columnar, half round, half-square triangular, and half-rectangle triangular. We started with a few blocks side by side and not touching to learn to draw the 3-D shapes we saw (at first Alec would shift his head to draw all sides of the block instead of just the ones visible from his seat). I didn’t demonstrate the “trick” of drawing 3-D cubes until after we’d drawn the first picture. I wanted to see what Alec would do on his own.

Then we added details of the wood grain, the black crayon marks someone had once scribbled on the rectangle, and the intricate shadows resulting from sitting next to a bank of 3 windows on summer mornings. We progressed to more complicated arrangements with the blocks touching, obstructing each other, or piled on top of each other. We set up the blocks on a large sheet of white paper to keep the arrangements simple and not add the table surface to confuse matters. Alec especially delighted in drawing shadows, some days he just drew empty outlines for blocks then happily shadowed them. I discovered that if I drew the shadows carefully and didn't worry too much about the blocks I got drawings that absolutely popped off the paper. Each time we finished we would swap seats and compare each other’s drawing to the blocks. I would take the time to point out things that had been well done and also how Alec’s work could be improved next time. He returned the evaluation.

The Element of Color:

Then we added color by using colored blocks and colored pencils. We discussed the color wheel and experimented with our crayons, markers, and colored pencils to see if it really works to blend colors (no it doesn't -- the pigments in these media are not pure so the results aren't accurate). Again we kept the arrangements simple and did not let the blocks touch at first. Just for fun, we tried going back to our imaginations and illustrating some nursery rhymes. This made our art lessons more relevant to real life and what we'd learned about shadows and 3-D shapes made these imaginary drawings much more lifelike.

Other techniques:

Recently we've tried scribble drawings with crayons -- first simple shapes like blocks and drinking cups, then portrait sketches and still life (bunch of bananas). This is a considerable contrast because it makes you think about overall shapes without getting tied up in petty detail. The challenge is to get a child to draw a shape without putting a line around it.

Special Project in Color:

I have a project in mind for Alec that should be both fun and thought-provoking. I want to put up an object with known and distinct colors and give him light, dark, and medium tones of utterly inappropriate colors. Sarah (my 4-year-old), gave me this idea. She isn't taking the class formally but on days when she feels like it she sits in and draws too. The day we did scribble portrait sketches she did one of me with purple hair, carnation pink skin, and blue lips, and electric green eyes. It looked extremely weird, but was quite fascinating.

Upcoming:

Today we're back to blocks trying pointillism with magic markers. Alec was utterly thrilled at how much more lifelike the drawings looked when you backed up. We're going to stay with this for several days and work our way up to more intricate shapes.

I hope to move outside and try landscapes and perspective now that it isn't blistering hot anymore. We've got some very interesting architecture in town that we can try to draw too now that we have out basics down. We might also try to go up to the dairy farm/ice cream place/petting zoo and try scribble drawing the animals.

I also intend to introduce texture by drawing various toys with fuzzy, shiny, matte, etc. surfaces. I have a friend who is a painter and she's willing to teach us to use watercolors. This is a very good thing since I've never made anything out of paint except for muck. We will also be doing some modeling with polymer clay.

Other notes:

Some projects we've done to break up the routine and keep our enthusiasm up have been collage -- both using pictures out of catalogs and shapes cut from constructions paper -- salt clay dough sculpture, and computer art.

We've had a good time so far with this and I anticipate continuing to enjoy it. The only problem has been that occasionally Alec is discouraged that his drawings don't look as real as mine. I think that he is doing very well for a just 7-year-old. I could use one of his block drawings to pick the block we used out of the box even if it isn't perfectly 3-D and photo-realistic.

Once I am satisfied with Alec's ability to draw what he sees I intend to start to teach him about picture compositions, etc. He's got a good instinctive sense of it. When he arranges our stuff he always creates a balanced, graceful arrangement and knows when something is out of place.

I want to point out that this art training has in no way stifled Alec’s love of art play. He is carrying the drawing skills over into his play and continues to enjoy art activities above all other pastimes.

Mary Beth Voelker

Copyright Sept. 1998

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