Everybody draw!
I’ve been making my living drawing pictures in books for over thirty years now, and for almost as long as that, on school and library visits and at book events all over the country, I’ve been encouraging everybody to draw. It’s such an important life skill, incorporating all kinds of useful thought processes and bringing so many rewards.
When you’re drawing, you’re using your creativity and exercising your imagination, you’re problem-solving, decision-making and applying logic. You’re doing a bit of unconscious maths, working out where to put things on the paper and what size to draw them. Drawing motivates you to take notice of the world around you and improves your powers of observation and your visual literacy. It benefits hand–eye coordination and helps develop fine motor skills involving the wrist and fingers. It calls upon your memory and prompts concentration and focus.
Here are one or two of the things that I say and demonstrate on my school and library visits and at my book events to encourage children from nursery upwards – and adults too – to get over their hesitations about drawing. Little tips like these do seem to help and might prove useful both at home and in the classroom.
I like to start off by saying that there are no rules about drawing, other than it should be fun, but if you’re drawing with a pencil, it’s a good idea to press down hard enough to get a good, dark line, rather than a very pale, thin one. Drawing with a strong, confident line will help make your pictures look like you really believe in them, and other people will believe in them too!