This paper introduces my research and understanding of children's art education from four aspects. First, to truly realize that children's painting is not a very simple thing, we must first jump out of the misunderstanding. Second, we should know the significance of children learning to draw. Thirdly, we should understand the characteristics of children's paintings, what is the difference between them and adult and professional paintings, and how to evaluate or understand some characteristics of children's paintings. Fourth, how do parents guide or choose art training institutions for their children? I will popularize it from these four directions.
Parents should jump out of the misunderstanding of thinking, children's art is not simple.
Many adults, including parents and teachers, think that children draw pictures, either for fun or to let them learn a skill and let them have the ability to write and draw in the future. In this way, it is very easy for children to learn art, so we see that many students who have just graduated from art colleges, with a little knowledge of painting, begin to teach their children to paint in training institutions.
Actually, that's not the case at all. In order to really teach children fine arts, or to improve children in an all-round way, it is really necessary to do some in-depth and systematic research to fully understand and understand the appearance, psychological characteristics and physiological characteristics of children of different ages, including the appearance of their works expressed through painting. Knowing these characteristics, it is necessary to conduct targeted guidance, which is a systematic and in-depth work.
The first thing we need to be clear is, why do children learn to draw? Why study art? For children, learning art is not unilateral, nor is it a skill learning. Many children have studied for several years, learned some techniques, learned some image description and learned some acting skills. They feel that this has achieved their purpose. In fact, art learning is extremely beneficial to children's all-round and multi-angle quality development.
Common misconception 1: The earlier you learn professional painting, the better.
A common misunderstanding is that many parents let their children get in touch with so-called more professional learning when they are six or seven years old or even earlier, such as sketching, oil painting, gouache and so on. But speaking from the overall thinking, I personally think that it is not too early for children to learn sketch, and they need more understanding, more rationality and more rules. Too early will actually cause a lot of interference to children. I have been in contact with many children. When he was only seven or eight years old, he began to look down on children aged six or seven and thought their paintings were naive. They draw children's paintings, and I study sketch and oil painting, so I'm awesome and I'm very professional. In fact, this is all wrong cognition. Childhood itself is a highly subjective period, which preserves their characteristics and allows them to fully develop as long as possible.
Learning sketch too early, or learning from us adults to get in touch with these professional things, will form some restrictions and constraints on children earlier. Sketch, for example, has clear requirements for contrast, modeling, structure, light and shadow, space and so on. To solve these problems, first, children must spend a lot of time doing some ineffective work, and second, they can't really understand perspective, light, shadow and color too early, but these will bind him. When painting, he always thinks about what the objective and real things look like, and he often dares not to paint.
I came into contact with a child who was only over 6 years old. I used to teach him to draw three-dimensional things, draw several faces and perspectives when drawing table legs ... but at this age, he can't understand these things, so he has to struggle with what to draw every time. For example, a topic: draw a train, other 6-year-old children can draw it soon, because they don't have too many constraints, just a few lines, divide the lines well, and draw a plane, windows, people and wheels. For the sake of children, he insisted on drawing the top and side of the train, but for his age, it was impossible to draw, which caused great obstacles, so he could not draw any more. For these so-called early education knowledge, we must be cautious, and we must not fall into some traps prematurely.
Common misunderstanding 2: Let children learn simple strokes one by one.
There is another thing that we have always opposed. Children learn stick figures too early, or teachers teach them some fixed images, which are binding things for children. In the process of children learning art, we must be particularly clear about who is the subject. At present, many training institutions are mainly teachers. The teacher draws on the blackboard or in front, and the children follow the teacher one by one. What they learn in this way has little to do with the children themselves. This is an image or knowledge, and teachers take it for granted that children should study.
When a child learns these things, firstly, he will form a fixed or patterned inherent image, which will be disturbed when he expresses freely. I think children's art learning should be children-oriented, and teachers should be assistants, follow them and guide them with their situation. This is a particularly important way. If we stand in front and take it for granted that children should be taught a lot, children will always be in an unconscious state of development, which is unfavorable to the cultivation of children's self-ability.
What is the significance of children learning art?
From the perspective of studying art, the improvement of children's comprehensive quality in all aspects is mainly reflected in these aspects:
First, the improvement of aesthetic ability. We all know that learning painting, through long-term edification and accumulation, is particularly beneficial to our aesthetic vision, understanding and cognition. Of course, aesthetics is not a particularly specific thing, which needs to be accumulated and edified over a long period of time. It needs to read a lot of excellent works and see a lot of broader excellent cultures in the process of learning art; At the same time, in the ordinary study, I learned some concrete things bit by bit, such as the collocation of colors, the structural relationship of pictures, and the rhythm in pictures, which are reflected in every detail and every link of aesthetics.
Second, painting is especially beneficial to the cultivation of children's concentration and patience. Children's love for painting since childhood is actually a particularly spontaneous and instinctive demand. We can see that many children are not necessarily very focused when doing other things, but when drawing, even if they are doodling something you don't understand at all, they can be very focused and stay there for an hour or even two, which shows that drawing is very beneficial to the cultivation of children's concentration.
Third, drawing is very helpful to the formation of children's habits or wishes and logic. Language ability and logical thinking, before these abilities are formed, painting is an important expression outlet for children. Through painting, children constantly draw something they want to express, his understanding of the world, his imagination, or his release of some emotions about the surrounding environment and inner feelings. Through this figurative and abstract painting form, they can gradually form an expression of logic and desire.
Fourth, painting is especially beneficial to observation and perception. We know that in painting, we often draw sketches, draw against objects, or go outside to draw landscapes or buildings. All these require us to observe, see, feel, see the changes of nature, see some details, see its shape and so on. After the formation of observation, it will be very helpful to improve his sensibility, which is a very important characteristic in painting, not only useful for art, but also beneficial to the enrichment of the whole life.
Imagine a person who has no sensibility. His life will be relatively dull and he has no feelings for many things. What is sensibility equivalent to? Just like when we have good taste, we eat delicious food and we will enjoy it. Similarly, after we have the ability to feel in art, we will have a sense of beauty when we see a very ordinary daily thing, and I will get a feeling of pleasure from it, so this is not only the benefit brought by painting itself. Through the improvement of our ability to feel, we can observe many things more deeply, feel more keenly and bring inner pleasure, which is a very important direction of painting.
Fifth, early painting plays a great role in children's understanding of life and the outside world, including enriching their imagination of the world. Because the world itself is made up of various concrete and rich images. Painting is the most instinctive intersection of our intuitive understanding of the world. Especially for children, the acquisition of many particularly abstract theories, reading books, or other knowledge is far less than the particularly direct painting form, which makes them feel more relaxed. So in ordinary courses, such as painting palaces, castles, cities, humanities and so on. , is a special image and a particularly direct way for children to better understand life and the world.
Sixth, painting also plays a very important role in cultivating memory. The so-called memory is generally divided into abstract memory, logical memory and image memory. If ordinary people have no training in painting, their image memory is relatively weak; If you have long-term painting training, your image memory will be particularly strong. For example, a person who has been trained in painting, after seeing a person once, must be very keen the second time, so he can recognize it, or he can quickly form an impression when he sees a strange thing, and then he can restore it after the second time. This is an image memory ability, which is very helpful for other jobs in the future.
It is also very important that learning to draw is especially beneficial to cultivate children's imagination. Generally speaking, the imagination of images can be cultivated through art, such as a group of disorderly lines like clouds, which may be considered by ordinary people as a bunch of disorderly lines. If you have rich imagination, it can be a dark cloud, the body of a sheep, the crown of a tree or the tail of a fox. This kind of image association ability can expand children's association ability through analogy, which is very beneficial for them to expand their ability in other directions in the future. When children are minors, they are less influenced by the objective world and have rich imagination. However, their imagination is random and scattered. Consciously cultivating image imagination through painting art is to let them gather this imagination, including painting creation, such as some of our thematic creations, so that children can expand their imagination and draw some storylines, which will help them to form some narrative imagination, not stick to real life, not stick to the particularly specific scenes they see, and form rich pictures through association, which is also particularly helpful to children.
It doesn't mean that children who study art must become painters and engage in art majors in the future. Through what I wrote earlier, in fact, children's art is to cultivate children's comprehensive quality from various angles. I think parents and friends must look at their children's understanding of painting from a broader perspective.
Children's early painting does not mean simply drawing a specific image in a short time, whether it looks like it or not. These are really not very important, but through this carrier, children can be fully nourished in different directions, which is more important for their long-term development in the future. The essential purpose of learning painting and its underlying significance should be considered from this angle. According to this logic, we should look at whether children are nourished or developed in the process of learning to draw from these angles.
Painting as a child is completely different from painting as an adult.
We need to know about children's paintings and their characteristics. Including their different faces at different ages, which are right and wrong, which we should strengthen and guide, and which we should avoid, these are all homework that our parents need to do. Otherwise, I don't know how to grasp the direction.
First of all, we should establish a basic concept. Painting as a child is completely different from painting as an adult. Adult learning is based on a more objective and realistic system. Therefore, in the transitional stage of children and cognition-adolescent training, we begin to sketch, try our best to achieve a realistic image and restore the truth. Adult painting, especially adult painting in the basic stage, is a realistic system and an objective system, which needs to show the proportion, structure, perspective space and color matching of the image more carefully and objectively.
Adults will fall into habitual thinking, whether they like or not, whether they are accurate or not, whether they are close to the real thing or not, and whether they are like the real scene we see in our eyes. If it looks like it, this one will be fine. If the painting is not like it, or there is a distance from the real scene, then we think it may be bad. So even if we go to see the paintings of famous artists such as Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse, most of them won't understand. Why, because of these masters, they draw different pictures from each other. He is not a true expression that we adults usually understand, nor is it an objective expression. It is more the expression of the painter's subjective factors, spiritual factors and performance factors, which is difficult for us to understand.
We can't understand the works of world-recognized masters, and we won't question them. We just don't understand them and think he is good and worth it. But looking back, we often fall into this misunderstanding of children's works. If the child's painting is not like it, or the child's painting is not as real as we think, we will feel that the child may not meet the requirements, or feel wrong, and we will fall into this misunderstanding.
What are the characteristics of children's paintings?
On the whole, children's painting language is a completely subjective behavior before the age of ten, rather than an objective and true expression. Children's painting presents a unique new look, of course, there are differences in different stages. Children's paintings are generally presented in a subjective, free and random form. Looking at children's paintings from this angle, we can gradually understand them.
One of the characteristics of children's painting: plane. When you grow up, you should pursue three-dimensional, space, structure and depth. For children, he can't understand the physical structure, space and perspective, so what they draw is often flat, because the scene observed by their eyes is flat, and the control ability and understanding ability of their hands can't meet the requirements of objective scenes. These characteristics are not bad or naive. These things are exactly what children should present, especially frank, simple and interesting.
The characteristics of children's painting: strong subjectivity. This subjectivity is arbitrary in color, image, composition and picture combination, and is not interfered by any objective image or bound by any objective world. Therefore, their paintings are often unconstrained. We can see that plane and solid are combined. The front and side of a character can be drawn together. The four legs of a table are all downward, and children may draw with their legs tilted. This is the child's understanding of the truth, a natural expression.
Three characteristics of children's painting: it has its own characteristics. What are the characteristics of children? Judging from their nature and interests, this must be quite crude and naive. We often see that children's paintings are particularly interesting, vivid and enthusiastic, especially not bound by objective images or the objective world. Therefore, if we give full play to this trait, we can produce some unexpected and interesting images.
Four characteristics of children's painting: strong sense of rhythm. This sense of rhythm is because when they are painting, there is no objective constraint and no specific image constraint, so their paintings are often flat, and some basic lines, some points and some color blocks are formed on the plane. These color blocks, points, lines and surfaces often form some strong sense of rhythm. This is a bit like our folk art, such as paper cutting and New Year pictures. In fact, this sense of rhythm has strong artistic characteristics.
How to plan children's art education at different ages?
Children's paintings change with age.
4, 5 years old and before: children are in the stage of subconscious graffiti, and have no sense of image, so they often draw some messy lines and some symbolic images, describing what they think. For example, they see some interesting things, hear funny stories, and express their inner sadness or joy through painting, instead of drawing a specific image, they are drawing something. Therefore, we can often feel that when four or five-year-old children are drawing, they have been drawing something that we can't understand at all. He will tell us a lot. Every symbol, every point and every line has its own language to express it. This stage is actually valuable. He is not drawing, but exercising his thinking by drawing. In this process, parents should communicate with their children as much as possible, listen to what he draws and let him say. This will encourage the child to have the desire to express, and secondly, it will make him form the habit of expressing. This habit actually exercises not the ability to draw, but the ability to think and express.
After 6 years old: children will have a particularly obvious stage improvement, and the sense of image will be initially presented. For example, he drew a little man, a cat and a dog, a house, some trains, a city and a building ... all of which can initially show the basic characteristics and appearance. At this stage, the stories they tell are more specific, and the things they draw can let us see what they are at a glance. At this stage, they don't have the ability to go into details, and they can't draw more concrete and vivid objects, but they can tell some stories better and more clearly through specific object combinations, and describe some scenes they like, the world they are willing to express and the ideas they are willing to express.
After 8 or 9 years old: children will enter a particularly obvious promotion period, and their ability to observe and feel details will be further improved on the basis of six or seven years old. They can draw the image more concretely and deeply, and see more details. For example, there are some changes in the objects in the picture, some changes in color and some changes in texture. During this period, their paintings were closer to the objective form. Of course, this period is still a plane expression, because they have no high or clear understanding of perspective, object structure and space.
But this stage is the most effective period for children to learn art. Why do you say that? During this period, he was able to draw a lot of images, and the paintings were relatively deep and informative. At the same time, he has well preserved the child's particularly naive and unrestrained nature, and there are particularly childlike things in the picture. So we see many excellent children's paintings, most of which appeared in this period. The period from the age of six to the age of nine is a particularly important period. If you want to send your children to study art, you must seize this period, which is a very important period.
/kloc-after 0/0 years old: children begin to enter the realistic period. The realistic period means that he began to pursue the space, proportion, perspective and regularity of objects, the details of images and the objective restoration of objects. Therefore, this period is both a period of progress and an embarrassing period for children. Why? First, their ability is striding forward to a particularly professional and objective perspective, but they have not yet reached the completely independent ability. At the same time, due to their pursuit of objective realism, it is easy to lose their boldness and freedom in childhood, and they will be somewhat restrained and limited in painting, or they are not sure when they walk back and forth. In children's art teaching, the period after 10 is called 1 1 year transition period. Now many educators are studying how to make a transition in this period.
How to choose a training institution
There are many kinds of children's art training institutions on the market now, and many parents are often confused when registering their children, and they don't know how to choose. In fact, when I answer this question, it is also difficult, because I don't know much about many specific situations. Generally speaking, parents should look at how to choose training courses for their children from these angles:
First, whether the concept of the training course is correct. There are probably several kinds of training courses on the market now: one is the teacher's indoctrination, for example, the teacher draws a unified image on the blackboard and the children follow it, or prints some simple shapes on paper for the children to color. This is a training method. This is a restrictive thinking that we oppose and a way to limit children's self-development. We should avoid studying in such institutions, but there are still many in the market. In this case, parents can actually tell the difference. Let's go to the audition, or look at the paintings in his classroom, or look at their circle of friends. If the children taught are basically the same, they all look the same at first sight. This is definitely a problem.
The second is whether the banner of "creativity" played by the training course is worthy of the name. There are many so-called creative training courses to cultivate children's imagination. In specific teaching, they have only improved a little over the last one. For example, there are many forms of play, such as gouache, super-gold clay and various comprehensive materials. But in the same way, if different children come out of each class, the result is still the same, but the materials are changed, which is still the same. The soup is not changed, so don't consider it. For children, it is of little use to learn a little so-called technology at most.
Third, it is inevitable to let children fall into the professional pit prematurely under the banner of being more professional. Some institutions let children start drawing sketches or special stylized Chinese paintings at the age of 6 or 7, which is also to be avoided. We see many institutions where children sit in front of drawing boards and sketch, copy and describe still life according to a book. For children of this age, first of all, it is ineffective, and secondly, what they have learned may be binding for them. And this kind of bondage is easy to make children have illusions. He thinks that he has learned some professional things and it is difficult to reform in the future.
Of course, after listening to me, you may feel that there is basically no place for all institutions to go, but it is not. This requires parents to carefully distinguish.
The courses of a good institution must be rich. Is there any knowledge, imagination, observation and thinking expression ability about children in different dimensions that can form some courses to train children? If so, I think this institution is good.
Specifically, first, for example, how are observation and sensibility cultivated? There must be many sketch classes, of course, this sketch is aimed at children over 6-7 years old; Secondly, there are a lot of creative courses, such as giving children different propositions and letting them draw what they can express. Such a course is necessary; The third is a course with children's own imagination.
If these three aspects are basically available, such an institution is basically suitable for children. Children should be the leading factor, and teachers as guides, followers and assistants are the teaching forms suitable for children.