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- Thread starter Geoffr
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stlukesguild
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That scene looks quite familiar. We always buy our grandkids art materials. We bought some nice toned paper and oil pastels for the twins who live in New Jersey. They started drawing immediately and let us take a few works home for the refrigerator gallery.
brianvds
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Enjoy while you can. Smaller children, almost universally, spontaneously take to art, and draw with confidence and abandon, beautifully, with a perfect sense of composition, filling up whole pages with color and form. Then, when they reach age ten or thereabouts, they freeze up, their abilities seemingly gone. It is my misfortune to give lessons to a bunch of primary school kids, grade 4 to 7, and almost none of them can draw half as well as an average six-year-old. I am at my wits' end. You have to go to great lengths to get them to make any mark on paper at all, their sense of composition is gone, they make these anemic little drawings, somewhere in a corner of the page, and constantly need help to get anything done.
Maybe if you ask them what they WANT to draw they may show some interest? Mistake: with a few exceptions, they all want to draw anime. Anime, anime, and nothing else. The few exceptions either don't know what they want to draw, or don't want to draw, period. Now, I have nothing against anime, and actually quite like the style myself, but alas, it isn't technically easy, so the kids soon end up very disappointed that there isn't some simple magic trick you can show them that will instantly turn them into expert mangaka. But they don't want to do simpler stuff either, because that's for little children.
It's difficult to compete with TikTok...
Hey, YOU'RE an art teacher with decades of experience: you tell us how to win and keep their interest.
