Drawing with Kids: Still Life

Miss Kinder tried her hand at drawing a still life. Even at five years old she was able to sit for a good amount of time and concentrate on her lines and trying to make the picture the way she wanted it. She loved picking out objects for her picture and arranging them on the table. 

At first she thought it would be better to choose items she thought would be "easy" so she picked a green mug, a rubber ball and a penny -- but then she spied the shell and the cactus and swapped them. After she finished her drawing she realized the mug wasn't so easy after all.

Setting up a still life couldn't be more easy. Have your child pick out a few interesting objects and arrange them on a flat surface. Set up your child with paper and a pencil. I tried playing some soft music for her, but she immediately told me that she couldn't concentrate, so maybe quiet is better. Then, let them do the rest!

In other news, Belfast, Maine appears to be officially unsnowy! We have mud! No more of this beautiful stuff, hopefully, for seven months!

Drawing with Kids: Contour Drawing

We checked this book out of the library and have been reading about artist materials and working on all kinds of drawing. Miss Kinder, age 5, particularly enjoyed the section on contour drawing, which happens to be the first exercise in the book. 

Contour drawing, if you aren't familiar with the term, is basically drawing the outline of your picture. (My favorite contour drawing artist/illustrator, as a side note, is the lovely Leanne Shapton.) The exercise in the book is to create a contour montage, which involves tracing the outlines of a few interesting pictures of your choice. 

We taped the magazine pictures she chose to the back of her paper (dancing woman, stack of money with eyes and cat face) and then taped the paper to a window so she could see the outlines most easily. After tracing the images, she spent some time tracing her pencil lines with a black pen and erasing any extra pencil marks she didn't want. Then she used oil crayons to color it in.

One of the rules the book emphasizes is that tracing isn't cheating, which I loved sharing with her. She and her peers seem to think that copying in any form means you are not interesting, or that you are trying to ruin the game or their drawing. She was very excited to see that this exercise specifically required tracing which allowed her to feel that her picture would have more of a resemblance to what she wanted it to look like, yet the end result is very different from the initial image so it's not merely a copy. 

I foresee more of these in our future.