Learning to Draw

I’ve never received instruction on how to draw, and I’ve never had the patience to try to teach myself. As I mentioned in a much earlier blog post, I got a book about cartooning when I was a kid, and just traced over the pictures instead of going through the steps to learn how to draw them myself! This year, I am really interested in learning something about drawing, and maybe even getting into a “sketchbook habit.”

To that end, a couple of weeks ago, I checked out several “how to draw” books at the library. The book titles caught the librarian’s eye, and she said kindly, “Oh, is someone trying to learn to draw?” I said, “Mmmm-hmmm.” And just as I was weighing whether I should explain that it was ME, she added, “A little one at home? That’s nice,” and continued scanning the books.

I have thought a lot about her comment, and all that it implies. I think many people might figure, “Geez, Lady, you’re pushing 40; if you haven’t learned how to draw yet, it’s probably not going to happen.” I think other people think of drawing as something kids do, as a form of child’s play. After all, don’t I have bigger responsibilities to attend to, more “important” matters to conduct than trying to get the angle of a jaw or the shading of a nose to reflect reality a little more closely?

I like the idea that drawing—even thinking about drawing—is making me look at things more closely. I am amazed by the shadows I notice on people’s faces, now that I’m considering what it would take for me to draw them. I’m also amazed by how so many people have features in real life that would look like a really bad drawing if you saw them on paper! (That sounds mean, but I really just mean that no one actually has perfect proportions, flawless skin, “textbook” eyebrows, that sort of thing.)

I am noticing inanimate objects in my daily life that have a significance that usually goes unrecognized, but I am taking note now as I think about how I might portray them in a sketch book:  the oh-so-precious morning cup of coffee, the box of tissue now in heavy rotation in our household, a bottle of nail polish, the sippy cup, the wooden Noah’s Ark.

My cat is getting greater attention as I wonder if I could capture that crazy pose she adopts during her morning lick-fest, her steely gaze when the girls descend upon her from opposite ends of the sofa, her evident sense of entitlement as she settles down on the warm seat I’ve just vacated.

I’ve made very, very few efforts to capture these bits and pieces of life in my sketchbook yet. Right now I am looking at the pictures in my drawing books, recreating the drawings others have done before me, trying to gain some confidence before I “draw from life”.

I am new to all of this—in a way, it does make me a child again, encountering something new and jumping in feet first to see what I can make of it. Maybe the librarian was not so far off after all, conjecturing that there was “a little one at home” interested in learning to draw. It just so happens the “little one” resides inside a grown-up’s body!

Busted!

The other day Katy looked into our dining room, and cried out in anguish, “Mommy, my sticker picture is in the recycling bin! Why is it in the recycling bin?!” Busted! Katy caught me tossing out some of her art. I pulled it out with little explanation, saying something brightly like, “Oh, I don’t know, honey. Would you like it?”

Another time she asked me for her “light bulb picture”—another sticker picture, made in Sunday school. I hemmed and hawed, sure that one had seen the bottom of the recycling bin, too. But I checked the file folder where I save some of her work, and breathed a huge sigh of relief to find it there. Her face lit up with relief when she saw it, too! Whew! She carried it around and talked about it for the rest of the day, even adding some drawings to it.

I do not save every picture Katy draws or colors. I do not save every tape picture, sticker picture, button picture, cotton ball picture. How do I decide? I try to keep anything that she has shown a great interest in—carried around for days, asked for a couple days later, that sort of thing. I usually keep a first: first crayon drawing, first pen drawing, first time the scribbles started looking like shapes. I keep things that I think show interesting development, as when Katy wrote two different kinds of lines, and called one “writing” and one “drawing”, and again when she called one a “story” and one a “list”; I find those fascinating and worth saving. I haven’t saved much she has done in preschool because she has shown little interest in these pieces, hasn’t wanted me to hang them up, and hasn’t wanted to carry them around, as she often does with things she really likes. (My suspicion is that the teachers do more of the work on these projects than she does, so she doesn't care about them too much.) I don’t have a tried-and-true set of criteria for making the decision; I just want to have a sampling of her work from her early years.

One of my Facebook friends recently posted a link to New York Times article from January 26, entitled “Mom, You’re One Tough Art Critic,” about mothers who are no longer allowing their children’s art to take over the house, choosing instead to throw it out. One mother of a preschooler is quoted as saying, “It’s my job to avoid raising a hoarder, and I’m leading by example.” She says her child does an average of two to four crayon drawings a day, so it’s pretty unrealistic that she could try to save every one. (She also mentions that her child sometimes fishes pieces out of the trash, and she then throws them away again!) The article compares “keepers” to “chuckers.” As with so many other things in my life, I try to inhabit some region between the two. The world does not revolve around my children, and my house does not exist for them alone to the exclusion of the two adults who live with them. At the same time, I don’t want them to think that their work is worthless, literally garbage.

I’ve read many, many household organizing books which deal with the subject of containing children’s artwork. Almost universally they recommend sitting down with your child at the end of the school year to go through the “collected works,” letting your child help you make decisions about what to keep and what to toss. Katy is a little young for that. She wouldn’t really understand the decision I was asking her to make, and as soon as she saw ANYTHING again, it would become a “keeper.” I’m pretty sure that whole approach would be counter-productive at her age. At this point, I just try to “read” her signals, and then make my decisions accordingly. And when I do toss something, I do it at night when she’s in bed, and push it down in the can or bin where she can’t see it the next day! Is that cowardly? Is that dishonest? I really don’t know, but it’s what I do.

So, what about you? Are you a “keeper” or a “chucker”? Do you keep everything your child produces, or do you have a system for thinning the stash to reasonable proportions? Am I flirting with creative destruction by tossing some of my kids’ work on the sly? I’m still a “new mom” in this particular area of parenting, so educate me, please!

Getting Back on Track

Do you ever have those days that you just wish would be OVER? They are so off-track that you are pretty sure the only solution is to give up and start over tomorrow? That’s the sort of day I’m having today. When the clock read only 7:30 a.m., I had already yelled at my daughters, and they were engaged in a “cry-off,” competing for loudest sobs. Instead of a "hello," Katy had begun the day fussing that she didn’t want her sister’s “lovies” in the room when we came in to get her out of bed. Then Bayla wanted milk, but not in THAT cup. Then Katy wanted a red outline of her handprint, but not with THAT red crayon. It was all just ridiculous. I quickly determined that trying to please them was not the path to success this day, so I changed directions completely. While Bayla ate her breakfast and Katy watched with interest, I pulled out my paper and paints, and set to creating background papers for my journal. The paint calmed me and calmed Katy, and breakfast calmed Bayla. By 8 a.m., I thought our day was back on track, thanks to a little Art Time for Mommy.

Of course, real life is never so simple and neat as that, and there have been plenty more rough spots today, even though it’s only noon. But every little step towards peace and getting back on track helps until I can start over again tomorrow!

Here are some of the papers I painted to use as backgrounds in my journal:

Here is an example of what a background paper might look like in a finished journal entry. (I made this entry on the first day of this month.):

And here is my journal entry from yesterday (cut off at the bottom), which reflects how I continue to feel today!:

So how do YOU do it? How do you get the day back on track, or just get through a day that you wish would END now, even though there are hours left to get through? (I have the feeling I'll need some more strategies to make it to 10 o'clock!)