drawing and exploring marksDrawing and mark making in all of it’s forms, is a really fundamental part of creating and expressing your ideas. It crosses into all other areas of creativity and is a powerful means of communication. I’m really interested in the way we all use drawings and marks to communicate and particularly in the way very young children will explore drawing.
Almost every project I work on will include aspects of drawing in one way or another – and this can be in a huge variety of materials. It might be drawing into mud or with water, it might be making and using charcoal, it might be making huge images with oil pastels, it might be drawing onto long rolls of paper to gather ideas… It can be an incredibly important way for children to express and explore their ideas; children draw for different reasons to adults and they can be just as much absorbed in the materials they are using as in the marks themselves. An image can say so much more than words – for example I’ve seen children express their ideas about cars through drawing rapid marks to indicate movement and speed. Drawing can make you laugh when you play around with materials and it can give rise to words and descriptions. The prospect of making an image “to command” onto a blank piece of paper can be really frightening and I’m really interested in exploring many different ways to challenge and combat this. I often use different kinds of “drawing games” with groups, which can lead to a million different marks and patterns. |
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