Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Artistic creativity in your gifted child

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.