Drawing and Painting from Real Life
Being able to create art from real life is an essential skill at a young age. It encourages art to be produced with meaning and for the children to look for purpose in everyday, mundane things.
For example, many artists, including Frida Kahlo, choose to draw or paint self-portraits. Sometimes it’s to show off their skills or to project how they see themselves to others. This blank face template is excellent for children to get creative when thinking introspectively about how they look to others. It also helps them recognize and accept differences in how people look.
Many famous and successful Natural Artists take inspiration from their environment. For example, Monet is an impressionist artist whose most famous paintings were of lily pads, poppies, and gardens.
This tree template is a great base for children to reflect on the seasons or experiment using different colors and mediums to produce other effects.
Knowledge of Materials
To excel in art and design, children need to understand the different types of materials that can be used. For example, perhaps they prefer to hold a pencil rather than a paintbrush because they have more control. Or maybe they want to try mixing paint, pencil, and colors. Having a finished product in mind and selecting the tools to achieve it is a practical, time-saving skill.
Drawing and Understanding Proportion
Learning about proportion is helpful for lots of areas of everyday life. From cooking and figuring out the number of ingredients to learning about money and ratios, understanding proportion is essential.
It’s an essential art skill for children to learn. The video from Twinkl explains how drawing a self-portrait involves lots of thinking about proportion and measuring the page to make it look correct and realistic.
Understanding Colour and Tone
School is a great place to experiment with colors and how they can be combined to create new ones – especially if it means you can get messy! Understanding what colors to use and how to achieve them is an art skill children can use to create fantastic pieces that parents and carers love to have on their fridges.
The tone is a much more complex skill in the art. Learning shading techniques and how tone can create dimension on the page is helpful, especially as children go up through the school.
Mastering Pencil Control and Brush Strokes
Having control over your pencil or brushes is a skill learned through practice. In art classes, young children will benefit from having good fine motor skills. Their art projects will be more controlled and have a better finish if they can control and keep their utensils steady.
