Art Studio for Kids is a series for children and offers a chance to explore and create.
When making art with children I’ve discovered the surest way to interrupt their innate creativity is to present them with your grown-up version. What’s worse, the little puppies force your hand. Of course, they know that you know that they are perfectly capable of grabbing a crayon and embarking on flights of fancy without an adult eye twitching over them. Still, they’ll just as soon implore you to do it for them and can’t yet manage their yelps of frustration whether you do or you don’t.
It’s not just them, it’s us. Hard to avoid the quicksand of self-criticism, judgment, and constriction as the inner critic wrestles the brush from our hand. As Shel Silverstein lyricized, it’s hard to do anything inside a boa constrictor.
But it doesn’t mean anything, that inner critic, other than that it’s there.
After the children are returned from school and are fed and humidified here is a little art offering to stamp out the inner critic and tease out the tiny Picassos. It might help them build some foundational skills. It’s a practice I use to tap into a child-like flow and will also level the playing field as you draw together.
"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."
~ Pablo Picasso
These can be drawing or collage exercises. If you’re planning to collage, have the shapes pre-cut for younger kids. For kindergarten through first, use the below images as stencils they can cut and compose/decompose into any number of shapes and patterns.
Part 1. Decomposing shapes
But how to bridge the impossible gap of getting from there?…
To here?
Part 2. A shape is easier to draw than an object
Outline. Resist doing it right.
Draw shapes.
Redraw over them. Nothing should be perfect.
Shapes are objective. They appear all over nature. If you can identify the shape, you can draw it.
It doesn’t matter what we draw because everything is made of the same basic shapes. There is nothing particularly unique about a figure, a horse, or a jar. When you think in this way they are all the same.
When it comes time to draw the object, you can make it your own.
You can draw anything.
To see the Master at work check out the below: Picasso’s Bull, Eleven progressive states of the same lithograph.