An Art Lesson

Lately Bree's really been into drawing. Pretty much any piece of paper she can get ahold of ends up scribbled on, bills, a page in her baby book... Which, while sometimes annoying and frustrating since I can't seem to keep a piece of paper to myself, is actually a good sign, active scribbling is sort of a milestone for kids, especially when they get to this age and start making "meaningful marks" on their paper. Oh, it's still just squiggly lines but you can tell things are starting to come together in a prewriting kind of way. It's been interesting for me to watch Bree go through these early steps towards writing and drawing in a meaningful way. At first it was really just really random and uncontrolled marking.

Then she started doing more of this type, which is still fairly random, but it's more controlled, focused on one area of the paper and you can see she's working on circles up there on the right side. Of course, that's when she's drawing a picture. When she's "writing" it looks completely different....

Just a few samples of Bree's "notes." She's into making lists. (NO idea where she got that little habit. I never do it myself. :P) And she knows what they say too, although no one else can read them. But obviously, she's picking up on the fact that writing looks like lines that go left to right.

And, for the first time here in the last week or so she's actually drawing things that you can actually kind of start to identify. This is her very first obvious picture of a person. See, round body, arms and legs and even a sort of face.

And this was her first attempt that I know of to actually try and draw a portrait of a real object. She drew it pink crayon on pink paper so it's a little hard to see, but it's a baby, (baby Jesus to be exact, she got a little pantyhose dolly in a blanket around Christmas time, Sunday School craft). But see, there's a head there with a face and an oval body as well.

And, actually, it's pretty darn good. (Although, as her mother I'm fairly certain that I'm required by law to think so.) :) But look, this was her actual subject there on the left, and there's her drawing of it on the right. (I fudged around with it in Photoshop to make it black and white so you can see the lines better.)

Pretty lifelike huh? I was impressed anyways. And I think it's funny she added eyebrows and a nose and mouth as well.


Of course, this is not to say we don't still get plenty of random squiggles presented to us that we're supposed to know what in the heck they are pictures of. Take the following two pictures:

I was handed the one on the left and informed, "Mom, this is a picture of when you broke that bowl." (I dropped a casserole dish on the floor the other day and it shattered into a million pieces, big mess.) I found that pretty amusing and I thought, well yeah, that does represent a crash pretty well. And, knowing that I was planning on doing a drawing blog entry I wanted to take a picture of it to post. So, I went to grab the camera. When I came back into the room a few minutes later I couldn't find the picture. After a minute of looking I came across the picture on the right. "Bree, is this that picture of the bowl I broke?" I asked her. "NO Mom," she told me in a quite exasperated tone, "THAT'S a bush!" Oh, well, silly me. Although once she told me, I can totally see a bush, can't you? I mean, how else would you draw one?

Oh yes, definitely a little Picasso on our hands here, or maybe more like a mini-Jackson Pollack, that is a rather abstract version of a bush. :)