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Drawn by a 6 year old. |
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A 7 year olds' fanciful bug. Note the
detail in the eyes. |
Later, around six or seven years, as you matured, and your perception of the world
expanded and became more complex, you tried to be more
realistic in your drawings. Rather than just drawing two dots
and a curved line that represented two eyes and a mouth, you
began to attempt to depict your subject in a more realistic
way. The eye became a compound object with a pupil (a dot), the iris
(a circle
surrounding the dot), and the eyeball (a circle enclosing the
smaller circle). And the mouth may have been drawn smiling as
a crescent shape with a grid inside it representing teeth. And now, a nose is
added that is a bulb with two dots for nostrils. These became
your own personal "symbols" of what an eye, nose,
and mouth looked like. In order to create likeness in a drawing of your
family, you always drew the same faces but added long hair for Mom and
Sister, and drew short hair for Dad. You may have even drawn
Mom and Dad physically larger than you and Sister. In the same
way you drew people, you drew objects; A chair was two very
flat ovals with two lines sticking out the bottom, and a
window was a square with a cross drawn inside it to represent
window panes. These "symbols" that you drew over and
over again got stored in your logical mind as what you would
draw if asked to draw. Rather than draw what your visual mind
ACTUALLY sees, your logical mind says "I see a chair -
here's my symbol for a chair." and you draw the chair you
drew as a child.
Around sixth grade is when you decided that symbols just
aren't gonna cut it anymore. You'd try and draw what you
actually see, but your conditioned, logical mind, kicks in and
overrides your creative impulse and spits out yet another
symbol, or even better, a modified symbol that does somewhat
resemble the object you want to draw. Your creative mind sees your symbol
drawing and says "This does NOT look like what I want! I
can't draw, so I will never draw again!" And so that was the
end of your learning. And from then on, when asked to draw, you
squirm and draw another symbol at the sixth grade level of
learning regardless of your age. Unfortunately, also around
the sixth grade, is when public schools stop requiring art
classes. Art now becomes an elective that you don't have to
take if you don't want to. The children who do end up taking
art classes are the ones who are comfortable with drawing.
These children may have even stopped drawing
"symbols" and started to access the creative side of
their brains and started drawing what they see by breaking it
down into lines and shapes.
What we will try to do with this website is to get you to use
your visual mind and suppress your logical mind. We are going
to break your habit of drawing symbols and allow your
artistic, visual mind to draw what it actually sees. Hopefully,
you will be able to let go of your sixth grade artistic mind
and re-learn your art skills. But this time, maturing in your
skill without giving up. These beginning exercises are meant
to show you how to suppress your symbol oriented mind and
begin to draw what you see and what you feel.
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