What do you do when your child's drawing is not "ideal"?
Take a specific object or pattern and let your child follow it?Tell him how and how to draw it?Help him decide what to draw?
Many parents choose to do this because it allows their children to draw things to look good. And other than that, it seems that there will be no other way to guide the child.
But in fact, there is only one result of persisting in this for a long time: the child has no mind and ability, and the teacher will not be able to draw if he does not teach. That's why we've been emphasizing that don't teach children to draw, but guide them to express themselves.
But "bootstrapping" is really hard, and today's article will give you a few very practical ways to boot. You don't need art skills, but you need to don't rush so much.
This article is transferred from "Yixi", ID: yixiclubAuthor: Li Su, has been authorized
When the child's work does not reach the state we want as adults, we give a specific thing for the child to draw according to it, or stipulate the method, steps, and content of the painting, so as to ensure that the child's drawing looks good.
But for a long time, our children have no thoughts and no ability, and I can't draw anyway if the teacher doesn't teach me.
When children draw, what are they drawing
Hello everyone, I'm Li Su from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I think we are all familiar with the works of two very famous painters I just saw, one is Van Gogh and the other is Picasso. In fact, every time I watch their work, I am thrilled. So why are there so many things that attract us in their paintings? If we go back in history, around the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, there were artists who began to pay attention to children's works, and these artists were represented by the artists of Romanticism. They didn't want to be constrained by realism anymore in the creative process, and they didn't want to learn all kinds of ways to depict real things that made them feel particularly restricted, so they began to look for some things in children's paintings, and they found some simple and interesting expressions in children's paintings particularly attractive. In the 20th century, Picasso was one of the artists who began to collect and study children's drawings specifically to draw inspiration for their own creations. We are all very familiar with one of his words - I have spent my whole life learning to draw like a child. Today I would like to share with you some of the unique features of children's painting. Children's drawings have many unique expressions, and they use typical facets in their paintings. For example, there is a little pig in the picture, and the side of the pig is its most typical side, so we rarely see a pig drawn on the front side of a child in a children's drawing, and the pig on the side is usually drawn.
The typical side of many animals is its side, and so is our vehicle. The typical side of our people is the front, so you can see that the front person is a very common theme in children's paintings, and the arms of the front person are generally stretched out and cannot be put down. Another very interesting thing about children's paintings is that they use transparent paintings to express their life experiences. This is the work of a German child, he painted the whole process of his meal, including how much he ate, and the trajectory of the movement of rice grains in the intestinal and digestive tract very clearly, very cute.
Children also draw in exaggerated ways. The little boy was particularly fond of brushing his teeth, and he especially liked the feeling of the toothbrush and foam stirring in his mouth, so in his paintings, half of the entire face was used to paint his mouth and teeth.
Children's drawings also use a blended viewpoint. This kid is painting a family of three eating lobster, and in this work we see an exaggerated drawing, the lobster is so large that it occupies a whole side of the table, and the lobster is a top-down view from above.
He himself painted the front of the painting, and his parents, regretting it, could only sit around the table like scattered petals. That's the very interesting thing about children's drawings, but we usually ignore it. Why is this so? I think after my presentation, it should be clear to you. This is the work of Miró, Spain. I would like to ask you a question, what do we usually think when we stand in front of a master's work?
I think in addition to the graphics, colors, lines, and so on that we see on the picture, what we really want to know is what the painter wants to express through these shapes, and what kind of thoughts and thoughts they want to tell us. However, when we see children's works, we usually think about what they are drawing, and rarely pay attention to what children want to express through such graphics and lines. This is a very interesting question, and it is also a painting, and standing in front of the master and standing in front of the child, our attitude towards the child is a little unfair.
I do basic research, and for many years I have been studying the development of children's psychology through experimental methods. But in the last decade or so, I have been trying to apply the results of my basic research to my educational practice, so I started teaching children to observe their drawing in the most natural scene. This is a mother drawn by a child. His mother has curly hair, wears glasses, and wears red clothes, and his mother likes to dress up.
When the mother entered the house, the little boy wanted to know what the mother was doing, and when he opened the door, he stuck out his tongue in surprise, thinking that it was a monster coming.
Actually, it was my mother who put on a seaweed mask.
Everyone will smile heartily after reading this painting, and I think everyone must have gotten the true feelings of the children in the painting. Therefore, we think that the most important of the three words "children's paintings" is "children", and there must be children in children's paintings, and if there are children, they must have their thoughts and emotions. A long time ago, Mr. Feng Zikai, a very famous artist in China, said that if you carefully observe the works of children, you will see that every stroke of their work flows from their small artistic hearts, and every painting is a small feeling of interest. As I mentioned earlier, I went from the lab to the practice to teach children, and in the process, there was a piece of pineapple that I called "a very famous pineapple painting" that had a great impact on me. At that time, there were a lot of fruits in the classroom, and we asked the children to choose their favorite fruits and draw in front of them. The one on the left was drawn by a 5-year-old girl, and she drew very quickly, and she finished it very quickly. I wondered why she didn't have thorns all over the pineapple, so I asked her what the pineapple was all about, and the kid said it was all thorns. I said, did you draw thorns? And she said with certainty that I did. I asked again, and she said that the circle I drew was full of thorns. I said, what's that empty place in the middle of you? She said it's the heart of the pineapple, it's the inside of the pineapple.
After listening to her answer, it dawned on me that my question was stupid. I was thinking that I, as a professional researcher, would ask such a question, and why was that? I was reflecting, and it was actually because I had a very stubborn pineapple form in my head. I'm sure you're like me, that form was invented by adults and thought it should be a way to draw pineapples, but in fact, the pineapples in children's eyes are different from what we see. Therefore, whether we study children or educate children in practice, we must go back to the children themselves. This is a very important motivation for me to do this research, and it is also a constant reminder for me to look at things from the child's point of view in my research work. So how do children draw, and what kind of works do children of different ages draw? Let's take a look at their development.
Before the age of 2: Early graffiti
Before the age of 2, we usually call them graffiti, and they are early graffiti. Some of the earliest children, around the age of 1, if they had access to paintbrushes and paper, they would leave some marks on the drawing paper very casually. This mark is very weak because the motor skills are not yet mature, but this mark is important for the child. It can tell the child that I can leave something behind.
Then he would start drawing up and down with movements, the first of which was downward, drawing such lines. Then slowly start to sweep left and right, develop a little more, and learn to push and pull up and down. So what should I draw next? It's time to draw circles. That's when this controlled ball of yarn appears. This stage is a very free and wild stage for children. At this time, children are very fond of this kind of activity, because there are almost no children who don't like to scribble.
To use a phrase from the famous psychologist Piaget to sum up this stage, movement is happiness. As long as they can move, they will have a very comfortable feeling physiologically. At this time, the child does not think about drawing anything before painting, mainly he wants to paint, but in the process of painting, he may find what he wants to express. We can often see that children at this stage will keep painting and painting all the time, and paint it as a black lump. If you ask him what he paints, he'll say I'm drawing a tornado, or I'm drawing a car exploding. At this time, what the children express through graffiti is not a specific thing, it expresses a thing, and records a development process. Although what you end up seeing is a result, the process is represented by graffiti lines, so it's a very interesting period. During this period, I had a suggestion that parents should make rules and find a place for them. We can find him a special space at home, put a big blank sheet of paper for him to draw, and tell him that you can scribble in this place and not in other places. Sometimes he may forget the rules, just remind him a few more times.
2-4 years old: Accidental realism
At the age of 2 to 4, children will stumble upon the fact that the things I draw seem to be very similar to some things in life. For example, we can see this part, and when he finishes it, he says it's a big tree trunk. This is also the case, after finishing the first half of the painting, he suddenly felt that it was very similar to the birds he had seen at home, so he added a lot of legs underneath.
The similarity found by chance allows the child to slowly find a tool to express things. As we grow older and have more experience in drawing, we can see that children will draw shapes of objects that are closer and closer to life.
There is a red circle on the picture on the left, and the child will say that it is a kitchen knife, and he will look for what things in life can be expressed with it. In the picture on the right, we can see the figure standing upright up and down, and the child says it's a ladder and next to it is water.
This is a child's drawing of me, do you think it looks like it? It's very similar. Those two big circles on my face weren't my eyes, my eyes weren't that big, they were my glasses. Because I love to laugh, he drew my mouth very big. When I was drawing, my hair was longer than it is now, so he painted hair all around my face.
I would like to ask you to look at a very important detail, which is that I have two fingers on one hand and six fingers on the other. A child of this age actually knows very well how many fingers a person has, so why does he draw like this? One of the most important reasons is that children in this period do not require realism. I don't want to draw exactly like you, I just want to use this thing to represent that you have, that you have a lot of fingers. Therefore, the children's paintings of this period are very similar in form and outline, and he did not want to faithfully reproduce reality, but hoped to represent and express. There are also some more typical character forms. The form I just drew is relatively beautiful, this one is relatively ugly, we call him the tadpole man, he basically has no torso, and his limbs stretch out directly from his body.
This is the germination of the earliest human form, and it is also the so-called failed realism at this stage, that is, I want to paint more likely, but I can't achieve it due to the limitations of many cognitive abilities.
For example, attention. When the child was drawing, he was attracted by a sound, and when he came back, he didn't know where he was drawing. There are also some children who have a bad memory, and can only remember so many things at a time, and in his paintings, these are not as complete as the parts we talked about. That's why we call the children's works of this period "failure" realism.
4-5 years old: Rational and realistic
When the child grows to the age of 4 to 5, he enters the rational realism. That's when we can understand their work. And at this time, the child also hopes to let others know what he is drawing through what he draws, so he will draw all the cognition of this thing in his mind. We can see the cat on the left, all four legs are drawn, and it is looking down, so we can very clearly understand from this angle what he is drawing, including the one with long ears and the tail, which is a common feature of his paintings.
On the right is a researcher who provides a three-dimensional model for the child to follow. As you can see, it sends us a message that people are in the boat, and whether we can see the legs of the people in the boat is not the most important thing, and he himself drew smoke in the chimney above the boat, which is not at all in the model. He just wanted to tell people that he was painting a boat, and there was a person sitting in it, which is the characteristic of the works of children in the period of rational realism.
The people drawn by children in this period are basically the people I just mentioned, who are upright and upright, and whose hands are never open.
After the age of 7 or 8: visual realism
On this basis, the child slowly enters the visual realism, and at this time the works we see are already very good, and they can depict some things in our environment more realistically.
I will use this model to analyze the difference between intellectual realism and visual realism. Rational realism is to describe the fact that he sees it, and I want to tell you that the person I painted is on a horse. Visually realistic children can really draw what I see, and I won't draw what I can't see.
It is probably after a development process of four or five years that our children have developed from graffiti at the beginning to a stage of more advanced visual realism at the end. In this process, what is the reason for them to draw more and more alike? As I mentioned earlier, some children use different observation strategies when drawing. We can observe that when children draw, sometimes they will stop looking at it and bury their heads in drawing, and some children will draw while watching, which will make a big difference in what they draw. There is also a child's memory, planning and organization when drawing, etc., all of which will affect his works. In addition, the child will have a lot of social experience in the process of development, including some language guidance from the teacher and discussion with the child, as well as his appreciation of the work. But the core driving force for his development is the child himself, in which there is a very important ability to represent insight. To put it simply, children know that I can use shapes to represent all kinds of things I see in life. On the other hand, he is able to generate a desire to draw things in his mind and find ways to translate ideas into pictures, which is a very important aspect of characterizing insight. Another thing that is more relevant to the child himself is his wishes. In all of our research, we can see that our child is constantly looking for ways to express himself in the hope of best portraying his knowledge of the world.
The development of children's painting takes time, it takes a long time, and gradually from graffiti at the beginning to drawing more and more similar. At this point, I would like to ask you a question, we especially want our children to draw like, so is this important thing or not? In fact, judging from the development process we just talked about, the child will definitely draw more and more like it in the end, so there is no need to worry. This is a very important development trend and a very important result of development. Why do we ask you this question? Tell you about a study I did when I was younger. At that time, we showed the children some pictures like this, and asked children of different ages to draw them. Each image may trigger some associations for everyone. For example, in the picture on the top left, some children say it looks like an apple tree, some say it looks like a peacock's feathers, some say it looks like a lamb skewer on a plate, and so on. The one on the right is a bit abstract to them, some say it's like a runway, some say it's like a band-aid. The following diagram is relatively abstract, it is the monogram of the Association for the Study of Child Behavior Development, which basically everyone has no association.
We put the drawings in front of the children one by one and let them follow them, and our request is, you can draw whatever you see, and the picture is always in front of the children, and we will see what the children will draw it like. In the case of this Band-Aid, a 4-year-old child will take different parts of it apart and put them together, which reflects a characteristic of his visual processing. The 5-year-old completely transformed it and painted it like this. And we asked him, "What are you drawing?" And he said he was painting flowers.
Let's look at this picture that looks like an apple tree, and the 5-year-old thinks it's an apple tree, and it's all drawn like a tree. It's probably only at the age of 7 that we children can draw whatever they see.
What this research has brought me to think about the most is that even if we let our children follow the pictures, the children will not completely follow our ideas, and they have their own active cognition and processing process of things. Think about it, if we let our children draw according to the teacher's drawings for a long time, what will happen to our children? Therefore, a child's painting is not equal to the appearance of the final work at all, it is not the process of making a work, in the process of a child's painting, it contains a lot of his thought process, as well as the process of his thinking activities. This work was given to me by a little girl on Children's Day, and of course I am very grateful to her for giving me this work, but after seeing this work, I am actually a little sad. Anyone who has some experience working with children can see that this painting is not actually painted by children.
Because in the works of children's independent expression, it is rare to see such a smooth spiral, the spacing between the spirals is very even, and the layout is also complete. This child's painting is rubbed with something round. I do not deny that in this process, the child experiences a lot of experience with colors and graphics, but the child's mind is reflected too little. This is a very popular practice in early childhood education, or in early childhood art education, which is work-oriented. Because we want our children's work to be good.
But the development process of children takes time, when the children's works do not reach the state we want as adults, we give a specific thing for the child to draw, or stipulate the method, steps, and content of the painting, so as to ensure that the child's painting looks good. But for a long time, our children have no thoughts and no ability, and I can't draw anyway if the teacher doesn't teach me. I sometimes think about my own upbringing, we have always been educated in art, but when we grow up, it seems like it is difficult for us to draw a picture. A very important point here is what I just said, children need to discover the intention of representation by themselves in the process of development, and they need to voluntarily explore what they want to express into a way, and actively transform it into the picture. Such a process is missing in the process of our development, so it may be difficult for us to draw a picture on our own when we are older. This is one of the very important reasons why I feel very sad when I see the little girl's work, because we still don't see the children's thoughts and ideas in the children's paintings.
How can I support my child's autonomy?
At this time, you may wonder, so should we let our children draw freely, at will? I want to tell you that freedom is not the same as arbitrary, nor is it the same as laissez-faire, and children should never move forward in isolation in the process of development, and we need to escort their development. Over the course of many years of practical research, we have found ways to support children in finding their own expression.
We start by enriching the child's experience.
This painting is a reptile afternoon drawn by children after learning the knowledge of reptiles. There are three lizard-like reptiles on it, one is a gecko resting leisurely with a wine glass on the trunk of a tree, the other is a chameleon lying on a branch and sticking out its long tongue to hunt, and there is a lizard hiding in a dark corner. Because the lizard is an ectothermic animal, it has just been very warm in the sun, so at this time it should hide in the shade to rest.
In addition to this experience in all aspects of life, the experience of fine art should also be enriching, so we offer a variety of ways for them to explore shapes, colors, and lines. On top of that, we also need to provide support for children to use these things and make them truly their own. The ability to observe is one of the most important skills in children's drawing.
But observation is not just about seeing, it involves the interaction of many senses, so we often provide children with objects to touch, smell and taste. After such a process, these things really enter the hearts of children, and their drawings will come to life.
This is a durian drawn by a child who is not yet 5 years old after observing it. These are very vivid pictures that they draw after their own observation and experience.
In addition to observation, we also need to design activities to support the development of children's imagination.
The children especially liked this activity, we drew circles of different sizes at different positions on the picture, so that the children could add something to turn it into another thing. For very young children, we can ask them to imagine what something looks like, and let them associate it with a lot of irregular shapes. We can also combine different colors and shapes to change direction.
We also give expressive tasks based on the children's experiences and ask them to draw.
For example, if we ask children to use the tree as a carrier to express the happy tree and the angry tree, it is actually to express emotions.
On the left is a little girl's drawing, she used bright warm colors to draw a happy tree, the most noteworthy is the roots, she painted a lot of lollipops, so that the tree is sweet from the roots to the leaves, and there is a little fox next to it who is also holding a lollipop. The picture on the right is drawn by a young boy, who, although not particularly complicated, expresses a happy tree with rounded lines and warm colors.
Let's look at the angry tree. The boy on the left draws an angry tree, and he uses a lot of sharp shapes, as well as a strong red color. On the right is a little girl's drawing, she drew a twisted tree trunk, and most importantly, she also drew some falling leaves, people do have a little bit of loneliness and loss after getting angry.
One more thing to do is to establish a connection between the child's language and drawing.
We will let the children take the initiative to tell their works, share some of their experiences and experiences in their works, and use some stories to stimulate children's imagination. This picture is a story of a fruit party that I made up myself. The general plot is that the grapes are lit up at night, and Miss Orange peels off her orange peel and dances as a dress. This is Big Brother Pomegranate, and it carries a small thing in its bag that shows a brown hairy head, which is actually a kiwi.
At the end I left an open-ended ending, saying that while they were all having a happy party, a dark shadow came to the scene of the fruit party, but I didn't say who this tall and thin black shadow was. This kid is drawing Uncle Celery. In some of these ways, we influence children at important stages of their development. We are also very happy when our children draw very good works. This is a children's painting that I like very much, and I call the camel in the painting a cute big camel. Whenever I see such works, I envy these children, because they can enjoy the joy and fun of self-expression during the most precious period of their lives.
In fact, in the course of my research, I have come into contact with many children, and almost none of them do not like to draw, and very few children do not know how to draw. What I want to say is that drawing should not be an activity for talented children, but should have the opportunity for every child to experience the joy of active thinking and independent expression as they grow up. In so many years of research work, the study of psychology has provided us with some general laws and characteristics in children's development, while I myself have seen more individual differences in children. Every child is different, and the most obvious of the individual differences are the differences in the speed and aspects of development. We can see that some children start out well and are able to express a lot of forms very quickly, but after a while they stagnate, and sometimes it takes a very long time. At this time, the most anxious are the parents, so at this time I usually persuade the parents, don't worry, let's wait and see, he may change soon. Because many times what we observe is the child's outward behavior, and we can't see what is going on in his inner psychology and brain. Some parents hold on, and he will see that the child develops very quickly. But some parents give up, feeling that their children have no talent for drawing, so it's a pity. Every time I see such a child, I am helpless, and I hope that our parents will be rational and persistent. After so many years of research, every conversation between children and me, as well as their works, has injected a very strong impetus into my research, and I also enjoy it. All this work I do is in the hope that our children's paintings will shine with the brilliance of their own thoughts, which is the best reward for our research work.
Article source丨Author丨Li Su, associate researcher of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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