Why teach drawing to kids?
When you teach drawing to kids, you’re giving them a skill that pays big dividends in today’s world. Drawing is the foundation for many forms of art. But you certainly don’t need to be an “artist” or work in an art-related career to benefit from drawing.
Anyone can use drawing to explore an idea, solve a problem, give visual form to a mental picture, or illustrate a project or plan. Therefore, drawing is a communication skill that has value for everyone, so we need to be teaching drawing to kids.
But when teaching drawing (to kids or adults), there’s one thing that often surprises people.
This may surprise you
Students are surprised to learn that drawing has a lot less to do with their hand and everything to do with their eyes! Drawing is more about seeing, noticing, looking carefully, and paying attention than it is about the marks they make on their paper.
When students are taught to look mindfully at something, studying its lines and shapes, light and dark areas, and relationship to the area around it, they may feel like they’re really “seeing” it for the first time. These are the observation skills that help us to best translate what we see in real life into a two-dimensional image on paper. We call this “seeing like an artist”.
