Childhood art

"Yes, that looks.. great," my mum said to my 5-year old self as she blu-tacked a scribble to the wall.

It probably didn't though.

I recently sorted through my old school work, all the way back until I must have been about 4 years old and even I can't tell what some of my pictures were of. I did get better pretty quickly and I think the spurt of improvement during my early years and the praise helped me continue to draw and be creative where so many children give up on their drawings and paintings; which I feel is a real shame.

As kids we grow at different rates and the art-related 'parts' of my brain just happened to kick in earlier than average so I was seen as quite 'talented'. Personally I don't believe in that, practise has had the biggest impact my far on my artwork, which came about as I enjoyed being creative and people praising my artwork. I think that if most children carried on in the same way they would be just as good.

There are elements of art that can be taught to do with colour mixing, perspective, composition, and history but the vast majority of the learning is not something that can be taught but only learned within through experience and self-criticism. Probably far more than most other pastimes.

I thought I'd share some of the early work. It is interesting that I was drawing pets even back then, although I was really into cartoons then so a lot were very anthropomorphic and I wrote a lot of little stories and comic strips involving characters I created.

Here are a couple of cartoon versions of two of our family pets, Holly (the labrador) and Oscar (my cat).  I did a lot of cartoon-like pictures and used to type up stories about characters I made up on an old typewritter and illustrate, like the one below.

This is the earliest, and strangely enough the most traditional, drawing I found (I even dated it). This of one of my grandparent's dogs Toby in their garden. They had a 1/2 acre of land which they largely used to grow crops and I remember always running around in all that space. 

For comparison here's a more recent pet portrait from a few years ago, also of a Jack Russell:

My point is that it was only through practise that I got any better and I don't think there's any secret to artwork that anyone can tell you, nor do I think 'innate talent' is important or even true. I have had people ask me in the past for some art tips. Obviously there's a method I use to get from A to B based on how the medium works (especially oils) but other than that it's just personal taste and practise.

Give it a try and a year from now have a look at your artwork and you'll probably see a vast improvement.

As they say: 

Practise makes perfect.

I'm still practising.