Week 2, Visual Arts.

Visual Arts Lecture

In the lecture today, I learnt that there are stages of visual art development in children. I didn't know this! I thought that as children grow up, the reason to why they could draw better lines and better pictures was because they adapt to gripping stationary and gain more control in how to use it. This is possibly and probably true but I didn't know that you could categorise children's artworks into stages. 

Stages of drawing (1): 

Scribble stage (Age 3-4): Children understand that they can make marks on paper using stationary.This stage is common in children who have a lack of experience in drawing and painting. 

Symbolism stage (Age 7-8): Children start to draw items that exist in life around them. They tend to start drawing things that are most important to them and the colours they use to portray their pictures usually match what they have 'learnt' about the real world (ie: Water will be blue no matter what!)

Realism stage (Age 10-11): Children start to draw with detail and start to develop a desire to draw realistically. 

Examples provided by uni.

Wilson's graphic principles: Why children draw the way they do!

1. Simplicity principle: The easiest, simplest way to draw. 
2. Perpendicular principle: Defying the laws of gravity, drawings that cannot actually exist in real life, the way it has been drawn. 
3. Territorial imperative principle: One can cut each item of the drawing without disturbing the whole picture. Each drawing on the page has it's own space and territory. 
4. Fill-the-format principle: Fill the complete page with drawings. ie: Hands will have an unlimited number of fingers just to fill the space. 
5. Conservation and multiple application principle: Repeated symbols in drawings. 
6. Draw everything principle: X-ray drawings! ie: Draw the inside and outside of everything. 
7. Plastic principles: Whatever is more important will be drawn bigger and more detailed, even though it may not be true to real life. 

All I could think of whilst looking at the examples was, "HOW CUTE!". So i decided to ask my parents if they kept any of my childhood pictures. This is one of them!

So this one was drawn back when I was in year one,  six years old! Apparently I brought this home after the first week back from school after the holidays. The topic was: Draw what you enjoyed most during your holidays. I think it was the first time I got on a train and obviously that must have blown my mind, because thats what I drew. A train ride! 

Symbolism stage. I would say that this picture demonstrates: Perpendicular principle (The train tracks going up into the sky), multiple application principle (Look at the passengers! All have same faces who look like my father despite the fact that even I was on this train, in Africa.) and plastic principle (The train takes up 70% of the paper!). 

Visual Arts Workshop

My beautiful friend and my semi-beautiful drawing.

We drew portraits in this workshop. Drawing human faces is rather difficult for me, I am still uncertain when it comes to drawing portraits so this workshop was good in that I could learn not only how to draw but how to teach to draw as well. We were given simple, short and easy-to-follow instructions on how to sketch the face and then we were given the opportunity to fix our portraits to resemble our opposite peer. It was fun and my partner and I laughed through the whole session as we gave each other 'facial reconstruction' with pencil and eraser. 

I learnt the steps to drawing a proportional face and will definitely practice! I can see this lesson in the primary classroom, I would probably give more time for younger students. I feel that this activity would most suit a stage 2 or stage 3 classroom where the children would certainly be in the symbolism stage progressing to the realism stage. 

1.  Matthews, J. (2003). Drawing and painting: Children and visual representation,  SAGE publications, London.