Art and Kids

OK so I am not all that artistic. I am relatively crafty and I have fun with art, but truly having an artistic bent? Uh uh, I mostly passed my art classes in school by sucking up to the art teacher and doing scut work to keep the art room clean.

However I figure art like music is a great way for kids to express themselves so our house has always been awash with paints, paper, pencils, crayons, oh the crayons! And pretty much whatever else you could slap on a piece of paper if you were feeling picasso like.

KC draws all the time. Literally. All. the. time. He goes no where without a pad of paper and some kind of drawing implement. He draws things to represent the groceries when we go shopping, practices writing sometimes, but draws the majority of the time. I didn't realize that his drawing abilities were above his age until yesterday.

I am going to be part of a teaching team at our UU church and the program has a huge art component. As part of the training they covered what kids typically draw at different ages. Curious, I read the section on 4 year olds and discovered that they usually draw heads with legs and arms coming out of them. KC did that when he was 3 but by the time he had turned 4 his people all ready had a blocky body and all the parts. In fact he tends to be very careful to draw details like eyelashes, eyebrows, fingers and toes. Recently, he has been careful that there are the correct number of fingers.

Kids his age apparently don't usually draw lots of things on a picture. They draw a big picture of themself as a walking head, with small bits and bobs around it. He does definately make himself large--unless he is drawing the rest of our family and then I notice he is careful to be more in scale. But he draws flowers, houses, big suns with happy faces on them.

So I guess he is ahead of a curve that I didn't even know existed! I wonder if the lack of "coloring books" in our house help contribute to that or if it is something unique to him?