I am curious to know if your gifted child is also artistically creative. Are the two linked in any way? I ask this because what alerted me to my DD3.9's potential giftedness was her advanced artistic creativity. She was drawing human and animal figures with details at 28 months, sings/hums almost non-stop, made her own lyrics at 21 months, was enacting and directing large scenes from books and movies at 28 months. While her language and math were advanced, I did not have a baseline and didn't think much of it. But I felt her artistic skills were pretty advanced and started to google milestones and realized that maybe she is gifted overall. Anyone else with similar kids? Has the artistic ability stayed with your kid as he/she grew up? Thanks.

I've felt DS9's drawing skills were above average, as it were, since he was very young. I don't recall ages any more, but I do recall that while the other kids were scribbling all over he was making careful circles, and while other kids were drawing stick figures he was drawing fairly detailed people. This past year he started drawing with perspective - very 3d. I have no idea where he picked it up, either.

I saw this linked on another board (parenting) and he's doing drawings like what's listed under age 12 - http://www.learningdesign.com/Portfolio/DrawDev/kiddrawing.html I have no idea how accurate that chart is, btw.

My ds loved to draw at an early age and he was/is able to draw amazingly detailed, accurate works. When other people see them they think he's an amazing artist... I tend to see it as not so much creative talent as a function of how his brain works - he's very spatially oriented, thinks in pictures etc - hence he's able to draw accurately.

My dd otoh, is not visual-spatial at all and most likely not even gifted intellectually - yet she's an amazingly creative artist - she loves to paint, has a talent for color blends etc, she is very musical and not only plays piano but is able to express feeling through her playing - not easy to describe, but very obvious when you listen to her play vs my other kids - and she's also a very creative writer - always coming up with new and interesting stories.

So for my ds - is his artistic talent connected to his intellectual gifts? Maybe... or maybe it's simply an outward manifestation of the way his brain works... which would sorta tie back to his intellectual gifts.

My dd - amazing artist. Not so amazing at math lol!

Re did their talent stay with them as they grew - yep. In dd's case it just keeps getting better and better... probably because it's her passion and she "works" at it happily.

Best wishes,

polarbear

My drawings most closely resemble the 3 year old's according to that. Feeling bad about myself now...

Thanks for the link. Looks quite interesting.

My DS6 was able to draw amazing pictures from a young age, except for people- they always had six or seven arms and legs lol. It wasn't until he was five that he started drawing the appropriate number of limbs. And only humans; animals were no problem. I wonder what that means....

My youngest started scribbling at 10 months, so I will be interested to see his timeline. He started to do the swirls at 16 months.

Ive looked at that link before and the drawings just don't seem like "typical" drawing to me, not compared to what I see in my kid's classrooms at all.

My eldest is very artisic, but she comes from a very artistic family (on her father's side).

Amy,
Thanks for posting the link. I have referred to the website many times too. The other one I go to is http://www.growminds.com/TheArts/GTinArt.htm.

The 12 year painting on the website you linked seems pretty complex. For a nine year old to be drawing like that is pretty amazing!

DD can draw things from one angle so the things that are on the other side are hidden or not seen at all. She was doing that before she was three and I recently read that that ability does not start until 6 or 7.

Interesting, polarbear. You listed many things in your post that have been brewing in my head but haven't coherently risen to the top. For example, the link between visual spatial and creativity; sensitivity and empathy that come with giftedness and how they influence the way a child perceives and depicts the world around.
Glad to find out that your dd's artistic ability keeps getting better. My dd also enjoys painting and drawing and her creations are getting more complex and beautiful by the day. Hopefully, she will continue to go to it as a source of joy and solace into her adulthood.

Lilmisssunshine, I am right there with you. I can hardly draw a straight line.

Squishy, that is funny. Maybe he was drawing out of proportion fingers and toes that looked like limbs. Your younger son sounds like a budding artist. Dd was deliberately drawing circles before she was 21 months.

MumofThree, I am curious to know what you mean by "typical". If you have any links that show typical drawings or talk about drawing ability by age, I would be very interested. My DH is also artistic but he thinks dd is way ahead of where he was at that age. Out of curiosity, are your younger children not as artistic as the first one or are they not artistic at all. Is there a link between their levels of giftedness and artistic ability. Any other ways your eldest is different from others- visual spatial, sensitive, etc.

Our oldest is now 10.5 and she is amazingly gifted in art. Her drawing ability is unbelievable! She doesn't draw all things at once - for example, if she is drawing mermaids on rocks she will draw the mermaids in their various positions and then draw in the rocks or water or boat or whatever it is that she wants them to be positioned on. She has always drawn this way - it completely throws her art teachers for a loop because they are used to kids drawing the rocks first and then setting the people on top. Her artistic creativity also extends to her being able to look at a photo and then "flatten" the thing in the photo in her mind to draw it. Once it is drawn she then cuts out her shapes and rolls them up to be the 3-d version of whatever it was she looked at in the photo to begin with. So, if she is looking at a photo of a flower she can visualize it in 3-d then "unroll" it in her mind, draw it unrolled and then roll it back up again in real life.
We also have found out in the last year that her artistic abilities also go to instrument playing - she has been playing the clarinet for a year now and is well beyond a novice level player. She can play by ear and can even take pieces from clarinet and play them on the piano - which she has never had lessons on.
Her younger sister does not seem to be as interested in art as she is, so I can't say if her artistic talents are as good.

LoveMyDD - some of the older children's drawings on that link above I have literally NEVER seen anything like them at my kids preschools/schools. When you are walking around the classroom there are pretty clear patterns in what kids' techniques are like, some of those example pictures seem like the ones that would make you go "WOW" in a classroom for the given age, not examples of what half the class is doing.

My kids are all very strong in the visual/spatial domain. My husband has prefect relative pitch, his sister has a PhD in Visual Art, his aunt is an exceptional painter. I cannot sing (at 2yrs old my eldest would scream in the car "DON'T SING MUMMY!!!!"), and my drawing is also at the 3-4yr old level on that chart.

My eldest DD is MG (on a good day), significantly 2e (AS, Dyslexic, CAPD, sensory issues). She's been able to sing in tune from 2yrs old, has extremely advanced pitch control for age, jaws would drop at the singing she could produce at 5-6 years old (mostly from favourite old musicals), then she lost interest for years and has just re-started and again when she sings in public it gets noticed. We moved states when she was 7yrs old and her Piano teacher's parting words to me were nothing to with a new piano teacher they were "DO NOT let anyone train that voice before she is 18..." Her drawing is definitely above age level compared to what I see in her classroom, both at her current school and her previous school (and that is held up by her grades not just my impressions looking at what is on the wall). Her skill at line drawing, shading, painting, etc, it's all above average (at the very least). She's had an explosion in her ability to copy or sketch in proportion over the last 6 months, this clearly depends on visual spatial skill. Certainly at the moment her artistic pursuits are more clearly advanced than her academics, but that said, as is common for a 2E kid the other Es are improving as she matures and the (near??) giftedness is finally starting to show through academically too.

My middle child is HG+ and LOVES art and craft, building, etc. She's learning Piano way faster than her older sister (along with all the other academic things she's going to bridge the 4yr gap in age). She does NOT have my eldest child's natural ability for singing, but may develop into a lovely singer yet. She didn't have the early obsession with colouring in and colour, but also seems to be increasingly advanced for age in drawing, I am not sure if that is a sign of her visual spatial skill or actual artistic talent... She was grade skipped 18 months ago and when she started in the new grade it was obvious that her drawing ability was developmentally behind her peers, however I did wonder how much that was skill v. exposure to different ideas/ways of doing things. Sure enough she's closed that gap along with all the other gaps she closed since skipping... Basically at 7 she loves to produce, she's less of a "natural" than her sister but faster at learning new skills. I have no real idea how much of what she can do is a true artistic nature or not, does that make sense?

My youngest is 3. A lot of the time she scribbles, but every now and then she draws people or objects and if you apply the "draw a person test" rules to the level of details she adds to a person (limbs, fingers, eyes with pupils and eyelashes, etc) it's quite advanced. Looks like a dogs breakfast though :-). Her singing is hilariously bad. Her dancing is pretty cute. I think it's way too young to tell...

I would say there is a connection between my children's visual spatial skill and their artistic skills, which is certainly a facet of giftedness.

I have been giving a lot of thought to that recent thread on spatial skills and STEM, the article that was linked further down the thread looks at Spatial skill and various career paths. It has a graph looking at the number of people who are in the top 1% for spatial skills but not the top 3% for Verbal or Math skills and whether they ended up in Visual Arts. I have often wondered about the number of people our family knows who are crazy artists, often in technology arts, who I am sure are gifted and wondered how did they get there exactly? Is it purely that art appealed more than STEM or something else? Are they 2E? That spatial skill article really tweaked my thinking about this group. I now lean away from "Are they all 2E" too, how many of them are more gifted spatially than verbal/math? Their mostly pretty verbal people but often express themselves kind of oddly...

Kerry, that is amazingly awesome! I know a couple of architectural students who have trouble with that kind of perception. She is still young but has she expressed any interest in what she wants to be when she grows up?

that's a very cool chart, Amy.

DD5 is a funny one with art - it's pretty solid work - quite careful, but not extraordinary... she does find it really enjoyable, though - and that's the main thing!

however, the work is remarkably detailed and does have some odd features which i guess aren't very typical for her age.

she always wanted to make accurate drawings, so she did a lot of copying images from books - we have a hilarious picture she copied from a Richard Dawkins book she loves - it's actually a fish, but the caption says My 185-million-greats grandfather.

i guess because she's spent a lot of time staring at pictures to get them right, she also includes a form of perspective by making objects that are farther away proportionately smaller. she has nearly always coloured in the negative space behind her subjects - for example, the sky would be filled in right down to the horizon line and the floor or grass would come up to meet it. she also began shading objects last year - for a 3D effect. the other thing that's happening now is that everything is getting a texture - wood grain, patterns on fabric, etc.

but like @polarbear said - i think it's more a function of the way her brain works than actual talent at this point. the requisite 10,000 hours later, though... it might really turn into something, who knows?

doubtfulguest, my DS6 also copies drawings. His originals are amazingly detailed (I can always pick which drawing is his on the classroom wall at school), but he is even better at copying. Like, seriously good- an exact copy. Nothing too fancy, just cartoon-ish drawings, but involve a lot of 3D work.

so cool! did he start because he was frustrated at not drawing from memory as accurately as he wanted? that's where my kid started...

From the Drawing Development in Children link, 14-16yrs:


I'm pretty sure I hit that "stage of life" by age 6. DD8 has already hit it, too. We're both highly V/S, which I think was the problem there, because the kind of results shown in all the stages up to 12 on that page are highly discouraging to us. The member of my household who truly enjoys art, and has produced remarkable works, is my DW. She's not nearly V/S to the degree DD and I are.

No, not out of frustration, just for fun. Sometimes he likes to plagiarise a book lol, he recreates the whole thing exactly. He does a lot of originals, too, though.

Art is one of those areas where I kind of feel like a shitty mom. LoL.

I love(d) art. I was pretty good at it too. In high school I chose to pursue computers, so I left off drawing for the most part and switched to photography, but when I was younger I drew constantly. I won numerous school contests, had my work displayed in local businesses, got to work on an installation for MayFest, etc... I was always super duper critical of myself though.. and I think it spills over onto my kids. I always try and praise their creativity, but I always think all their drawings just look like "kid drawings" if that makes sense, lol. I do see, though, that some of the stuff DS9 is doing seems advanced. He was considered the class artist last year, which he was quite proud of!

My son is amazingly creative storyteller/author. Just about everyone notices it. He's been writing "books" since he was 4. He also writes poetry and 'makes movies.' He's not very good at drawing, imo.... his fine motor skilss are pretty low. But he is a pretty amazing creative writer.

DD6 could draw people pretty early, and was intensely crafty by two or three. I'd say she's an okay artist right now but when she focuses she's pretty advanced and always very creative, how she puts supplies to different and unexpected uses, etc. She did an amazing painting of nature habitats last year that got a lot of comments from friends who paint. She can also make up songs and poems off the cuff with amazing rhythm, rhyme, and imagery. A lot of her craftiness goes into her desire to be an engineer, which I'm less able to support than early childhood art or literary studies, but hey ho I do my best.

I'm about a three to four year old on that chart epoh posted too! Ds5 seems to draw about as well as I do, but is very creative in writing, inventing, music, etc. I have seen no correlation between drawing and giftedness in him. We both draw pretty rudimentary stick figures. He leans toward drawing very schematic plans, labeling everything to make up for his lack of ability to represent things well. We did get a late start in coloring in this house though. I didn't even give him paper and crayon till he was at least 2.5-3.