Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion 4yo 'abstract' drawing

My dd4 is doing some really beautifully composed drawings lately, however they are not attempts at figures or really any 'thing' else I can readily discern. I try not to impose my ideas about drawing too much on her, and she does sprinkle in some drawings now that show people, flowers, the sun, so it's not like I'm worried she's missing some dev. stage.... these are really neat drawings, just wondering if others have children with this interest. Anyone else have a 3, 4, 5 y.o. who is doing not scribbles, but really more like shape compositions?

Now that I think about it, ds around age 5-7 was drawing something completely different in form but similar perhaps in intent... series of circles which he would link with lines to make sort of complex star-like drawings or polyhedral-ish things.

DS, now 5, went through a phase like that from 3-4 (I'm embarrassed to say that we haven't been doing so much art lately, which I intend to remedy).

Oh cool, thanks for responding, I have never noticed mention of a phase like this in the few things I've read about the development of drawing in children.
Not exactly related, but an interesting read on scribbling/mark making in children, I have only gotten through part of this...

http://drawingwriting.com/scribReQ.html

We go through ups and downs around here, sometimes related to whether we have a stack of fresh paper readily available! They do go through the paper.

Our boy started drawing stick men when he was about 3. Not your ordinary common-or-garden stick men, but ones with life and movement.
When he was around 5/6 he did a pencil drawing of of nude men on a beach in a kind of Matisse style, before he progressed to doing sculpture.

When he was 9 he presented some work to a tutor in the High School who immediately referred us to references on Giacommetti - our son's work 'uncannily' like his (we Philistines's had never even heard of him)

A lot of this stuff he took to school to 'show and tell'

A lot of this stuff strangely went missing.

More recenty we ahd the copper wire workcruxifixes, which the teachers grabbed!

Now I'm looking around for a reasonably priced fine art foundry who can preserve a lot of his mini 'masterpieces' as the wax and clay he uses has a limited shelf life.

I wonder what's next

Pictures, people, pictures.

I wouldn't call it a phase with my DD. It just depends on her mood. Sometimes she is all about drawing people, animals, flowers, etc and other times she is into drawing abstract pieces. The other day she wanted to paint so I gave her some watercolors and expected to get a muddy mess. She filled the page with vibrant colors that blended well and no mud. I was impressed.

I have noticed that her drawing is effected if I'm drawing. She loves to watch me draw and attempt to do the same techniques.

Kind of on a different topic but DD has been writing forever and in the past few months she has started to write her name backwards: the mirror image. I found out this weekend from one of the moms at DD's school that her daughter has always wrote her name backwards and chances are DD is copying her and is now in the habit of it. Both girls are left handed so I can see why it would be easy to start on the wrong side of the page.

I'm curious if drawing is like talking (where kids can go from nothing to full sentences)?

DS3 makes fairly artistic looking sculptures for his age but he refuses to draw or paint. He got excited about painting a few weeks ago, spent 2 minutes at it and decided "the toes were too long"... he couldn't make his brush do what he wanted and he gave up a few minutes into it, sobbed for a lot longer than he painted. He is SO hard on himself.

I can't figure out whether I should keep encouraging him to mess around with paint or crayons etc, or whether I should just avoid mentioning it for some months. Every experience with it just seems to turn him off of it more. Unlike Play-doh, where he seems to be pretty happy with how his things turn out.

To bring it back to the thread -- DS's sculptures are generally as realistic as he can make them.

Polly

Polly
If he is an artist and he wants to do it he'll do it - and nothing you or anybody else can do will change that.I see my job with DS is to be a facilitator (I certainly haven't an artistic atom in my body) - so I provide the means and encouragement and let him get on with it.

When he took lunch to school he would come back with sculptures made from tin foils and the wax from around the small Edam cheese thingies - just can't help himself.

When DD7 was about 2 1/2 she came home from her toddler program with really cool swirls of paint in an obvious pattern. When asked what they were she said that they were us (mom and dad) - the colors are the colors that she said made her think of us and they were pictures of us dancing with her! She was in the "abstract" phase for a couple of years, but then suddenly, and purposefully changed into the realism phase she is currently in.

She draws on everything she can get her hands on! My mother got a large bag full of little pads of paper about 1.5 inches wide and 4 inches long and she takes one with her everywhere - she has come up with some pretty amazing things on the way to school, or to the store, or even just sitting there on the stairs before coming inside.

I agree with Raddy - if your child is an artist, there is no way anyone can change that. We are getting photo albums with the little pockets to start preserving all of her miniatures because DH thinks they are just scraps and throws them away without looking at them .

We are in the process of changing a quarter of her room into an art space - complete with a plastic covering over the floor. Because we can no longer give the space up in the living room to all of her and her sister's project.

Polly- there's nothing wrong with sculptures, if he's happy making them then just let him explore. I'm sure he'll eventually become interested in other materials as he gets older but it looks like he's found his niche.

DD paints pretty realistically (ok, well, for an almost 2 year old). We've had a dinosaur painting that included a head, tail, and four feet (all which she explained while painting it). She also likes drawing babies (they actually look pretty similar to when she asks me to draw babies for her so they're all swaddled up with heads, closed eyes and hats). She'll also try and write some letters. s Beyond that she draws a lot of little marks on her papers. It's kind of funny, she hasn't scribbled since well under 1. Rather it's like she's testing out the color to see what it looks like so it looks like a bunch of spots on the paper. My mom was actually an artist and I'm not half bad myself so I'm interested to see if she's gotten the "artist gene" too (both my mom and I are good at portraits not so much with abstract painting). I wonder if DD's drawing are more realistically because she's just copying what I'm doing or if that's just the way my family tends to think?