The comfort of drawing Batman

Drawing with kids

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

I know lots of parents are stuck at home with kiddos right now, so I thought I’d put together a big list of my favorite resources for drawing with kids. (If you’re stuck creatively, by the way, nothing helps like drawing with a 4-year-old.) I’ll start with instructional books and videos, and move on to supplies.

Instruction

Ed Emberley’s books

My all-time favorite drawing book is Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World, which takes a collage-like approach to drawing:

Here’s a sample of one of the spreads:

If they like Make A World, there’s a ton of other Emberley books for them to get into.

And here is a short documentary for kids to get to know the wonderful man behind the books.

Super Simple Draw

Think of Super Simple Draw as a kind of animated version of Ed Emberley’s books. My kids love to sit side-by-side and follow the directions. There’s a couple seasons on Amazon Prime, but there’s also a ton of videos on YouTube.

Here’s their video for how to draw a robot:

And here are some drawings from when Owen was 5 and Jules was 3:

Lynda Barry’s books

Nobody has taught me more about the magic of drawing than the queen, Ms. Lynda Barry. Her latest book, Making Comics, is filled with exercises perfect for kids of all ages, but I love everything she’s done. Most recently, she’s posted some draw along videos to her YouTube channel.

Here’s a video of Lynda talking about how anyone can draw:

Here’s how to draw a chicken:

And here’s Lynda drawing a cat, a turtle, and a dog.

Lunch doodles with Mo Willems

I love Willems’s books and these Lunch Doodles not only provide a drawing lesson, Willems also shows off his studio and talks about the process of making the books. (They’re all archived on Youtube.)

Other great illustrators who are sharing lessons on their Instagrams: @wendymac, @carsonellis, and @mikelowerystudio.

Supplies

Art supplies are some of the best gifts you can give kids, but so many art supplies made for kids are straight-up junk. Here’s some stuff my my boys love that isn’t terribly expensive:

Crayola Slick Stix

Regular crayons are cheap and they don’t make a mess, but they’re hard to hold in tiny hands and kids have to really press hard with them to get any kind of decent result.

These Slick Stix are easy to grip and they lay down a really silky smooth line.

Give some of these to your kids along with some big pieces of paper and pretty soon you’ll have a bunch of Jean-Michel Basquiats to hang around the house.

Box of single-color Crayola Markers

This tip comes from my wife:

If your kid has a favorite color of marker, instead of buying another 8-color pack from Target or wherever, go online and buy a box of a single color in bulk.

(Our youngest goes through a ton of black.)

Do-A-Dot Markers

My youngest son had trouble making circles early on, so he loved to use these for wheels on cars, faces, etc.

They’re a little expensive, but they last a long time. (Try the exercises in Ed Emberley’s Funprint Drawing Book or copying pages from Little Blue and Little Yellow).

If you print them on top of each other, they mix color, so you can do a little Toddler Color Theory.

Sidewalk chalk

If you have a sidewalk, a driveway, or a concrete porch (see above) give them some sidewalk chalk and kick their butts outside.

Don’t forget paper. Lots and lots of paper.

Worry less about the quality and more about the quantity. We just go to Costco and buy whatever gigantic boxes of cheap copy paper they have and let the kids use as much as they want. (People would probably be shocked if they knew how much paper our 4-year-old goes through. But it’s worth it.) My friend buys paper for next-to-nothing in thrift and re-use stores.

Happy drawing!

Listening for another world

Sunday, February 9, 2020

My kids leave abandoned drawings all over the house, so I like to steal them and add (the wrong) words. This is my 7-year-old’s drawing + words clipped from the newspaper.

The portal

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

This morning a spotlight appeared in the ivy on our back fence. It looked like the rising sun was burning through, opening up some kind of portal. (It was really just a reflection off the window of the house across the street.) I walked out and stuck my hand into the beam to make a shadow puppet.

I wished I could stick my head in and see what was on the other side. Then, just a few minutes later, the sun rose high enough that the portal disappeared.

Here is a book Jules (4) was working on a few days ago:

I think all the time about how much your relationship with your children can be a two-way street — intellectually, emotionally, artistically.

The images you show them in the world enter their minds and come out through their fingers, but, like all artists, the images they make with their fingers also enter your mind and open your eyes to new images out in the world.

Update: I showed the photo at the top of this post to Jules and he dismissed it completely. “That doesn’t look like a portal, that looks like a fence.” HA.

What pictures of horses can teach us about art

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Here are two books about art and horses open on my kitchen table this morning.

The top spread is from Dr. Seuss’s The Horse Museum, which was produced from an undated, unfinished manuscript that Theodore Geisel’s widow found in a box. (In the 1950s, before his children’s books had become popular, Geisel had worked on a television series called Modern Art on Horseback.)

From Kirkus:

This posthumously published text recently discovered in Ted Geisel’s studio uses horse-focused art pieces to provide historical context to artistic movements. Showing art ranging from the Lascaux cave paintings to an untitled 1994 sculpture by Deborah Butterfield, Joyner’s playful illustrations surround the curated photographs of art pieces. By using horses as the departing point in the artistic journey, Seuss and Joyner are able to introduce diverse perspectives, artifacts, and media, including Harnessed Horse from the northern Wei dynasty, a Navajo pictorial blanket titled Oh, My Beautiful Horses, and photographs by Eadweard Muybridge.

My personal favorite part of the book is the appendix in the back which goes through each individual piece of art featured in the book and its creator’s relationship, if any, to horses.

I got to thinking how interesting it would be to go through the archives of my own favorite artists and compare horse pictures.

Here, for example, are some of Saul Steinberg’s drawings of horses:

The other book on my kitchen table is unlike any book I’ve ever read. Heidi’s Horse, originally published in 1975, is a book by the painter Sylvia Fein, collecting her daughter’s drawings from her very first marks at the age of 2 up until the age of 17. (Fein was inspired by the Henry Schaefer-Simmern’s The Unfolding of Artistic Activity.) It’s a wonderful record of how the visual mind develops over time.

The book can be hard to track down, so here are the sections summarizing Heidi’s progression:

Here’s another page focusing only on Heidi’s horse heads (the title is, admittedly, kind of terrible, at the very least it should be Heidi’s Horses, plural):

In 1985, Sheila Graber animated Heidi’s Horse into this 16-minute film:

https://youtu.be/0iKc3_wQpbE

And here’s a great video from 2006 of Fein talking about the progression of children’s drawings and Heidi’s Horse:

If you sit down with a kid and watch them draw, it’s the most wonderful experience in the world. You’re seeing transformation right in front of your eyes.

The book has been hugely influential on me as I track the progress of my youngest son’s drawing.

More about kid’s art and art history: “Caveman drawings”