help your child to draw / need your opinions and help here

[joburg]

After trying for a couple of years to encourage my (now) 6 yo daughter to try drawing/coloring I almost quit. She was just not interested and found it hard work instead of fun. Since I am an artist/ graphic designer myself, it was so disappointing to realise that I might never be able to pass on my skills to her, especially when i know that drawing exercises are the best way towards improving a child?s fine motor skills necessary later on for writing.

A few months ago I decided I?m gonna take revenge (lol!) and if my daughter doesn?t want to draw, I will do it. I ended up with a bunch of drawings that raised my daughter?s interest. I was drawing and she started to want to draw alongside me.

Long story short ?.. this all ended up in an art manual for early ages that I published on Blurb focusing on 3 main skills that my daughter seemed to lack, creativity, color coordination and fine motor skills. I can certainly get into more details if somebody is interested, but I don?t want to bore you with all the instructions here. Let me know if you want to know more about this and I will post them in detail.

Please take a look at the book I have created. I could use some feed-back. Do you think this approach could help your child? Since starting working on this book my daughter does nothing else than using my sketches and drawing and coloring and drawing again. Do you think this might work for your kids?

Please let me know what you think ?..

Check a preview of the book here: www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1217695

Children don"t need to be taught to draw and colour - they just need to be left alone with good quality materials and allowed to get on with it.

And we certainly don't need to buy a book, however subtly advertised, telling us how to do something that comes naturally to children!

it's lovely looking, not sure how it would help, can't read the words as they are so small

Art manual?
Instructions?
It's not really what drawing is about for young children as far as I'm concerned.

You are advertising.

I am sure that it must have been frustrating for you that your daughter wasn't interested in what you liked doing, but I think it might have happened anyway (DS is 6 and likes drawing now a lot more than he used to).

Don't think the book would have much impact on either DS or DD 4 tbh. Although the drawings are nice.

i am advertising noup, i do intend to look for a publisher, not sell this on my own, but for this i would like to have some help and more ideas/oppinions from you mums so i can shape/ improve my work before i can try to publish it.

Seeker, you say kids need to be left alone with some good quality materials. This is what i am trying to create. I tried to buy coloring books for my daughter, and guess what? There were just outline drawings that made her scribble around.

southeastastra, i didn't want to post all the instructions here thinking it might bore you mums. I'm happy to do it, if anybody is interested in them.

NoahAndTheWhale, the link i sent is for a print on demand site. This means that they print only a single copy of your 'book' which makes the costs go up a lot. I used this site to print sample copies of my book so i can show them to publishers later on. In the meantime i only ask for help from you, oppinions, ideas ...

When I said good quality matreials I meant pencils, crayons, paints and paper. Not pictures to colour. As my godson said to his reception teacher "If you had wanted a coloured picture, why didn't you buy a coloured one in the first place?"

if you want to advertise on mumsnet there is a £50 charge, go to the small businesses section.

There were just outline drawings that made her scribble around.

Sorry, but I don't really see the difference between this and the book you linked to. Except half the pictures in your book are already coloured in. I don't think small children need colouring books, personally. A big pot of glue, some coloured paper and a lot of crayons and glitter is all we have needed to get my daughter aged three interested in 'art'. If your child isn't interested, maybe their talents lie in different areas?

And what's wrong with scribbling when you are little? This sort of control freakery which says to children "you are doing art wrong - do it this way" makes me cross.

Don't you feel that for some children (and adults) that drawing/colouring in just isn't their bag and we need to accept that? We need to accept our children for who they are and not what we want them to be?

My son HATES drawing/colouring in and anything to do with art was a form of punishment yet he builds the most amazing lego models that show amazing design skills, choice of appropriate materials, colour, symmetry etc. I have taken pictures of these models and would love them to be put up in his classroom but no, unless it's on a piece of paper/made out of junk modelling then it's not art.

You are reinforcing the classic classroom sterotype that art is only worth something when it's on a peice of paper.

My son has found his own creativity and is now 6 and is slowly picking up his pencils becasue he wants to and becasue he has found a purpose. He wants to write but is most definately still not into drawing.

I am a teacher who was also disappointed that I wouldn't be painting, colouring, sticking, playdoughing etc etc but I love ds 1 for who he is and don't wish him to be any different.

By the way you are advertising...

Message withdrawn

when I taught we;

looked at still life by arranging frint and taking photos, looked at backgorunds and the effect the different colours had on the way the photos turned out

made sculptures out dolly mixtures which they loved...

designed chairs and were lucky enough to have a class set that were being trown away that we could actually use.

When my children asked 'is it finished yet?' I showed them VVG's singiture and said that he had signed his work and that when they felt their work was finished they should sign it as they are the artist, they are in control of their art and will know when it is finished.

I hated going into other teacher's rooms and seeing identical pieces of art that had been very 'adult/teacher' directed giving the impression that, as seeker says, you are doing it wrong, do it this way if it's not the same as everyone else.

Hmm, why was it bad for your dd to scribble around the lines? maybe that's what she liked doing, but your attitude told her it was wrong. As an artist surely you know that there are myriads ways of producing artwork, in many different media.

If you were trying to make her draw like you, it's probably not going to happen because your work is highly stylised and doesn't look very appealing to children anyway to be blunt.

I don't get how the (very expensive - don't think most people would pay that much) book is meant to help. It looks like a story book with white spaces to me.

My ds wouldn't do any 'mark making' at all. He didn't want to try in case he didn't get his picture exactly how he wanted it. I got him an usbourne drawing book and left him alone with it. Eventually he started looking at it and copying the pictures. He never did any scribbles or anything and I wanted him to be willing to put pen to paper before reception. He is never going to be artistic or produce anything very original and creative but it has helped as he is willing to draw stuff that he has to (this week for homework he had to draw clocks showing different times etc.) and even though his handwriting is pretty shocking, at least it exists.

thank you for so many replies. despite the thing that most of you didn't understand the fact that print on demand sites are not exactly selling books (of course you can buy them, but the printing costs are huge because they can print as little as one copy), but they are mainly used for printing a couple of copies for you, family, etc. In my case i would need to have a couple of copies ready if i want to show them to somebody to publish (don't know much about the publishing thing yet, it was just an ideea, since my kid loved the little book). The site lists a price there by default if you want to make the book available for others to check it, but that is not my selling price, it is their price to print it. Sorry if you got me wrong.

Anyway, i did get a few ideas from you mums. Thanks.

What worked well for my DD in the case of these drawings, was that she discovered the liberty of drawing things differently (seeing me using the african patterns she finally got the courage to draw her own shapes without trying constantly to copy pre-defined ones and then feeling like a failure). So she finally started to draw. And she enjoys it this time. I never forced her to draw (just the opposite of what one of you assumed) but she felt she had to because she saw other kids in the classroom. So she was pretty upset when she couldn't do exactly what others were doing.

The partly colored pages idea came also from DD. She was pretty discouraged in front of a huge white area to cover. So we started to split the space in squares, waves, etc, I would put a color there, she would put another one next to it. It worked. Instead of hurrying to cover half a page with one color, she took the time to combine colors, did it thoroughly and felt finally good about her work. Her drawings are pretty original if not 'artistic' nowadays .... i noticed the word art upset some of you.

So, I am just trying to find out if these kind of exercises might be a good idea for other kids? I only tried them with DD and a friend of hers and they both enjoyed it.

Muppetgirl - Dolly mixture sculpture? Sounds fab, what did you stick them together with? Icing?

I want to do a dolly mixture sculpture! NOW

ProfYaffle no, we used glue and then varnished them. They looked fab! But we did have a little problem with the reception lovlies as they thought they were edible!

I loved teaching art and the freedom we gave the children -making canvases out of old picture frames and then stretching calico over and colour washing the fabric and then using simple repeating patterns. They were all different shapes and sizes and looked great when displayed.

Joburg - I am sorry if you feel I misunderstood your intial aim it's just that in your first post you said that you were disappointed that she wasn't into drawing. I felt you were wanting her to be something she didn't want to be. However, in your last post you say you were trying to help her as she did want to draw but was put off when she was faced with an expanse of white paper (which is very true. Ime children were very put off/frightened by being told to 'go create' This is very different I would say. To help her do something she wants to do is different to being disappointed in her lack of interest.

Can I also say that colouring in and drawing whilst being great for fine motor skills are really not the be all and end of success in pencil work later on. I would say it's alot to do with the 3 'tions' 1. Inclination, motivation and concentration. Once you've got any of those then progress will follow.

Think you'd have a problem with me eating them tbh! Am determined to figure out an edible solution, hmmm ....

I know i mentioned my disappointment of not being able to teach my girl what i know. That shouldn't necessarily turn me into a controlling freak I mentioned it because i wanted to explain why i continued to try to find ways of helping DD with her struggle into working with pencils and paper, and more than that, with her creativity. For her sake when she felt she is not as good as the kids in her class, and for my sake when i knew we could still have fun together if i find the right way to hep her get rid of her inhibitions.
There were also some posts respoding to the scribbling world i used. Scribbling is just fine as long as your kid is happy with it. DD was not, she told us she didn't like her own works. So she stopped drawing all together. The problem was she had trouble controlling her fingers. As soon as she was supposed to work on small areas, she was happy. Fine motor skills work as explained in the book!

I did ask in the beginning of this thread if anybody would be interested to hear more about this silly work of mine. I didn't get too many requests of more information .....

i think it's great to learn techniques however young. we had an 'art of animation' book from disney that taught how to draw animals etc. was really great to learn techniques, makes it so much easier.

i wish we were taught from a younger age - only really focussed on at secondary before we just guessed

I'm finding that my lad CAN control his pencil well and can copy , but doesn't know where to start "drawing something". He does better if he copies someone drawing, so he sees where they start and what elements they consider to be important to copy from the "real thing" IYSWIM.

Its as close to creative mark making as hes got yet, so I'm happy for him to copy for time being.

stencils could be good to use as an aid to draw more 'realistic' picture I think.