Using Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes

Ms. Brookes explains that anything we can see or draw is made up of these components:

• Straight Lines


• Curved Lines


• Angle Lines


• Dots


• Circles

So she begins her drawing instruction with learning to recognize and draw these elements. For fun, visit Cartoon Particles, a breakdown of Disney characters into the basic shapes. If we can learn to see things broken down in the individual elements, we can more easily draw them.

In Drawing with Children, each lesson begins with a warm up exercise using the elements. There are different types of warm-ups, so there's no need to get bored with one type.

One type of exercise is making up your own abstract piece of art with bold colored markers.

One person gives general directions which the others can interpret as they choose. For example, you may say:

• Draw four blue circles anywhere on your paper.


• Using a new color, make three intersecting lines that go all the way off the edges.


• Overlap your dots with black curves.


• Using any three colors you choose, draw sixteen curves inside a huge circle.

Another warm-up involves duplicating abstract patterns.

Looking at abstract patterns made of these elements and copying them later transfers into breaking down any image into the elements it is made up of and then drawing what you see.

Ms. Brookes says that you should "spontaneously use some kind of similar warm-up before each drawing lesson." The book offers some examples which you can copy. But you'll certainly have to make some of your own. Visit Donna Young for many free printable warm up exercises (such as the image here) that will keep you busy for some time. Art Projects for Kids sells practice pages for grades 3-5 and also for grades K-2. Each set is $5.

A third kind of warm-up is the mirror image one.

This is most challenging, in my opinion. You complete the symmetrical missing half of a shape. Visit my blog entry about Symmetry Sketches for more information and for some free printables. Donna Young's site has some mirror image practice pages too.

From the directions on pages 75-79, we drew birds. Here is Sprite's finished drawing, based on the step by step directions.



Because she wasn't totally satisfied with her results, she made another bird, relying more on her own imagination rather than the steps from the book.



And lastly, she went down her own path, creating a totally different style of bird.


Using the directions on pages 106-112, Sprite drew this all by herself. She simply followed along with the step by step pictures in the margin. I doubt that she read any of the text as she worked on it.


Mona Brookes recommends having a picture file for inspiration and for subjects to sketch. Despite the feeling that copying from another source is "cheating," Mona reassures us that even professional artist use various photographs and the works of other artists as references. It's not cheating at all. We must first see what we are to draw.

This is a pencil sketch of a rhino that Sprite saw in a science book.



So begin collecting photographs, magazine ads, greeting cards, and calendars. We have found that our postcard collection works very well! Sprite is, like any 9 year old girl, a lover of all animals. So she enjoys browsing through the postcards to find an interesting animal to sketch.



This giraffe drawing is actually from a postcard:

We didn't really care for the still life selection offered in the book. I also felt that to copy something from a book was drawing from a graphic and not actually a still life. So I allowed Sprite to select some things to sketch. She chose a red bike helmet and some various toys.

This is her sketch:



And this is mine:



Anything can serve as the subject of a still life. Here is a plush backpack that Sprite chose and her sketch of it.



Sketching can happen anywhere you go as long as you prepare ahead and take some paper and pencils. Recently my daughter sketched some dinosaur fossils at a museum.

My daughter is crazy about animals, especially cats, so she often chooses cats are her subjects for sketching. Here are four pieces she sketched on canvas and then filled in with oil pastels. (Done at age 11.)



These were done in her free time, without any prompting on my part. She did request some canvases, and I obliged by providing the materials she needed. Using real artist materials seemed to give her a real pride in her work and demonstrated that I value her creativity.