Austin Kleon

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Drawing with kids


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!

False lines

After doing a lot of blind contour drawings I’ve started noticing when I make false lines — lines that seem like they should be there, but aren’t based on actual looking.

This happened last night when I was watching a William Kentridge documentary and found myself filling in features on his face after the screen switched from a shot of him talking.

It’s not about a line not looking right, exactly, a false line does not feel right when you make it.

Once you train yourself to notice false lines and that icky feeling you get from making them, you push yourself to go back to looking harder.

There must be a correlation here with writing. We use the same term — “lines” — to describe units of words across the page.

How do we know when we’ve written a false line?

If you draw, the world becomes more beautiful

Here is a quote from E.O. Plauen’s In Defense of the Art of Drawing, written in 1943. (If it sounds familiar, I used the first sentence in Keep Going.)

“E.O. Plauen” was a pseudonym for Erich Ohser, a cartoonist in Nazi Germany, who was forced to work under a different name after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

From 1934-1937, he drew a (mostly wordless) popular weekly strip called Father and Son:

Here is a photo of Ohser drawing with his son, Christian:

Unfortunately, Ohser’s story has an unhappy ending: in 1944, just a year or so after he wrote the words that began this post, he hung himself in a prison cell after being arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death.

Drawing Miles

Last night Meg and I watched Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool on PBS and this morning I drew a zine about him for Owen’s lunch.

One thing I had completely forgot was that he started drawing and painting in his 50s. He said he thought painting helped with his “demons.” He wrote in his autobiography:

“It keeps my mind occupied with something positive when I’m not playing music. I get obsessed with painting just like I get obsessed with music and everything else that I care about.”

A couple of his drawings:

(The one on the left reminds me a little of Kafka’s drawings, and the one on the right a little of Miguel Covarrubias.)

You can see more of the paintings here and in Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork.

Drawings from Pop-Up Magazine

Here are some drawings done in the dark during a Pop-Up Magazine show last weekend. My favorites were, no surprise, two of my favorite artists: Esther Pearl Watson and Liana Finck. (Both of whom I finally got to meet!)

Drawing is often talked about by drawers like me as this ultimate tool for capturing and processing life, but when does drawing pull us out of an experience rather than pull us into it? When does drawing cause us to pay less attention rather than more?

I used to do these kinds of live drawings all the time, and now I find them terribly distracting.

Years ago, when I went to live events, I wanted so badly to be onstage myself that I think I felt drawing was a way of pulling some of that spotlight towards me. Sure, it was a form of sharing, but it was also a “Look at me” kind of thing.

Drawing at performances was itself a kind of performance.

Now that I’m onstage all the time, I want to be offstage. I want to sink into the audience and disappear into the experience. I want to honor the performer by giving them my full attention.

Not sure I can do this while drawing!

Left to their own devices

I find it almost impossible to draw my kids unless they’re absorbed by some other activity. (I drew Jules drawing the other day, but I had to wait patiently for his bouts of getting up and pumping his 4-year-old fists in admiration of the lines he’d put down.)

One activity they get absorbed in, of course, is staring at screens. Hence these drawings, made in the Dart Bowl Cafe.  (Owen, above, is transcribing graffiti on the cafe wall into a note on the old Kindle we gave him. Jules, below, is watching the PBS Kids app on his mom’s phone.)

Every parent I know angsts about screen time. My position is: Not all screen time is created equal.

“[T]he most important issue with screen time is not quantity but quality,” writes Mitch Resnick in Lifelong Kindergarten. “There are many ways of interacting with screens; it doesn’t make sense to treat them all the same.”

I read a good op-ed the other day about how the Amish use technology and how we should emulate them:

When a church member asks to use a new technology, the families discuss the idea and vote to accept or reject. The conversation centers on how a device will strengthen or weaken relationships within the community and within families.

I was fascinated by this case:

In another case, a family wanted to run propane gas pipes for lights to every room of their home instead of running them only to the kitchen and living room. (The Amish choose not to tap the electrical grid.) Church members discussed how the change would affect the family. If the family members could separate into bedrooms to read at night, instead of gathering in the living room, would their ties fray?

When I heard about that discussion, I thought of a woman at my children’s school who said the disintegration of her family began the day her husband bought a TV for every kid’s bedroom.

You don’t have to adopt the values of the Amish to adopt their approach… but you do need to have your own values! Otherwise, you and your loved ones will be swept away in the tide of whatever new junk comes around.

For example, in our house, we value reading, space for personal alone time, and lots of sleep, so we trust our 7-year-old to use a night light to read in the top bunk while his 4-year-old brother sleeps in the bottom bunk. (In this story, by the way, the night light and the bunk beds are pieces of technology.)

But back to screen time: One thing I find interesting looking at these drawings is that both kids are hunched over screens, but their faces and hands give away their level of engagement. Both sets of eyebrows are furrowed, but one set is in concentration, the other in grumpiness. Look to the lips: Owen’s are raised into a mischievous smirk, Jules’s are turned down, in boredom. The hands, too: Owen’s out like spiders on the keys, Jules’s bunched into fists…

Another lesson of drawing: it helps us see what’s right in front of us.

Blind contour drawings

For the past week, I’ve been making a blind contour self-portrait — drawing without looking at the page — each morning to warm up my diary.

If you look at the images in order, it looks like my face is re-arranging itself. I love that.

My friend Wendy MacNaughton assigns these drawings in her workshops. My friend Jason Polan used to do a lot of his Every Person in New York drawings this way.

Sam Anderson, one of my favorite writers, wrote a wonderful Letter of Recommendation for blind contour drawing five years ago in the New York Times. (How in the hell did I miss that?)

He wrote of his frustrations with trying to draw in his adult life: “The problem, fundamentally, was one of control — I had too much of it, over too tiny a territory, and I wasn’t willing to surrender it. You can’t control your way out of control.”

(I’m thinking of Brian Eno’s control <–> surrender diagram that he likes to draw.)

Then an artist friend suggested to him he draw without looking at the page.

“For the first time in my adult life, I was genuinely surprised by something I had drawn.”

He later discovered that blind contour drawing is an old art school exercise:

Freshmen at art school are forced to draw blindly for hours. It’s the fastest way to break them out of old bad habits, to make them unlearn lifeless conventions. The goal of blind drawing is to really see the thing you’re looking at, to almost spiritually merge with it, rather than retreat into your mental image of it. Our brains are designed to simplify — to reduce the tumult of the world into order. Blind drawing trains us to stare at the chaos, to honor it. It is an act of meditation, as much as it is an artistic practice — a gateway to pure being. It forces us to study the world as it actually is.

(You can see Sam’s drawings on his Instagram. And go read Boom Town while you’re at it.)

I think a lot of people come to contour drawing in Betty Edwards’ classic book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, but I actually prefer the way Kimon Nicolaïdes writes about it in his 1941 book, The Natural Way to Draw. (Edwards sort of waves away Nicolaïdes’ emphasis that “students imagine that they were touching the form as they drew,” but I find his multi-sensory emphasis much more convincing than her left brain / right brain explanation.)

Nicolaïdes writes:

Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see — to see correctly — and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye. The sort of ‘seeing’ I mean is an observation that utilizes as many of the five senses as can reach through the eye at one time. Although you use your eyes, you do not close up the other senses — rather, the reverse, because all the senses have a part in the sort of observation you are to make.

He tells the reader to sit close, learn forward, and sync up a point on the thing being drawn with the eye while simultaneously syncing up pencil to paper. “Imagine that your pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper. Without taking your eyes off the model, wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching that point on the model upon which your eyes are fastened.” He says only then should you start to move your eye and pencil along the edges of the thing being drawn, slowly, slowly. “Be guided more by the sense of touch than by sight.”

This exercise should be done slowly, searchingly, sensitively. Take your time. Do not be too impatient or too quick. There is no point in finishing any one contour study. In fact, a contour study is not a thing that can be ‘finished.’ It is having a particular type of experience, which can continue as long as you have the patience to look.


If you’re looking for a way to loosen up and bring life to your drawings, try drawing without looking at the paper.

Hands in motion

Gjon Mili, photo of the juggler Stan Cavenaugh, 1941

Looking at Gjon Mili’s remarkable photographs of humans in motion, I was reminded of all the drawings in Jason Polan’s Every Person in New York with more than two hands or arms:

“I only draw the person while I can see them,” Jason said. “The majority of the drawings are done (mostly) while I’m looking at the person, not at the paper.”

If they move or get up from a pose, I cannot cheat at all by filling in a leg that had been folded or an arm pointing. This is why some of the people in the drawings might have an extra arm or leg — it had moved while I was drawing them. I think, hope, this makes the drawings better.

It does.

You can draw whatever you want (in memory of Jason Polan)

Jason letting me look through his sketchbook at the Hotel San Jose, 2016

“It’s like, anyone can figure out how to draw something. But it’s hard to tell people how to see something.”
—Jason Polan

Of all places, I was in a hotel room in Crystal City, Virginia when I heard Jason died. I was trying to decide what to eat for lunch. I started crying. I typed “Taco Bell” into Google Maps. I stuffed a handkerchief in my back pocket and put on my sunglasses so I could keep crying. Then I walked to a mall in Pentagon City.

Jason Polan’s desktop wallpaper

They say life is stranger than fiction, but life often feels like bad fiction. Stupid, over-the-top, a-little-too-on-the-nose fiction. I hadn’t walked a block when I passed a demolition site. Workers were spraying the building with a big jet of water to keep the dust down while a bulldozer tore it to pieces. The fencing around the site had been covered with multi-colored bicycles and  inspirational phrases: “WHY NOT? BREATHE. EXPLORE.” I passed a glorious patch of pansies. (Oh, for crying out loud!)

When I got to the mall, I ordered a Crave Box with a Dr. Pepper and sat down in the food court to eat. It tasted really good. Then I made a drawing.

“If you draw at a Taco Bell, you’re a member,” Jason said, of Taco Bell Drawing Club. “There are no rules. I often draw people, but you can draw whatever you want.”

It was such a thrill to show up on Jason’s blog

When I got back to the hotel I was scheduled to do a Q&A in a room full of a hundred people. I told them a short version of what I’m about to tell you:

Jason was one of my favorite artists. He was, more importantly, a total mensch. A sweet, soft-spoken guy. I really liked his work and I really liked him.

A blackout poem I made above one of his drawings for The New York Times

His art was the embodiment of so many of the things that I love. He believed in walking around and looking at everything and drawing what you saw. He paid attention. He did that thing that all my favorite artists do: He found magic in the mundane.

He was born a year before I was and grew up one state to the northwest, in Michigan. You could tell he got a little thrill when he drew a celebrity on the street and he wasn’t at all ashamed about it. He seemed absolutely sincere and, well, American to me in his love for things like cheeseburgers and Taco Bell. He wasn’t jaded or ironic. He was enthusiastic. (Attention = love.)

An ad Jason took out in The New Yorker

I think of him as a drawer, but he was a writer, too. He knew the power of words next to an image — if you look at his drawings, the captions are really what provide so much of the drawings with meaning. (I loved his long, rambling Instagram captions.)

He’s one of the few artists whose work I happily hang in my office and also in my kids’ room. He seemed to have that kind of child-like spirit that really gifted drawers are able to hold onto. I once complimented him on his drawing, and he tweeted back, “I feel my drawings have gone downhill since I was about five.”

The last time I saw Jason was in the summer of 2018. I was in New York for no more than 24 hours, and I randomly bumped into him while browsing the gift shop at the Whitney. I remember he apologized about how sweaty he was from walking around. “Otherwise, I’d give you a hug!”

We only got to visit for a few minutes and then I had to hop a cab over to Brooklyn to get my picture taken. (I don’t remember this part, but my diary from that day says: “I told him I loved seeing the world through his eyes — he seemed touched that I said that.”) I had no idea until a few days later that he’d drawn this picture of me:

It made me so happy to think of him out in the world with his Strathmore pad and a Uniball, scratching away, maybe stopping for a slice of pizza. I can’t believe he’s gone. My heart goes out to his family and friends. I’m so grateful for his work and I’m glad to have known him.

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