I don't know about you, but I hate this cerebral type drawing, where you take a subject, analyse, restructure and reduce it into some components, etc. It's no fun and uses faculties that I want to rest when drawing. If I draw like this, what happens in my head is pretty much the same as when I work. I'd definitely not teach kids to draw this way. If anyone is interested in alternatives, check out Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards [0][1]. First edition came out quite a long time ago, and it has some popular neuroscience sprinkled in there from that time, but if you get through that, the actual learning material is very good. You'll be surprised how effective it is.
I disagree, this is how I learned by myself (no book, no adults) and it was so much fun! The book just makes a system of it: you identify basic shapes to create an envelope then enjoy tracing beautiful lines.
People used to say I have "a gift", that was annoying. So many times I offered to teach anybody (using a similar method as the book) but no one ever accepted. "See? It's not a gift, some people just want to put the hours".
Well, I've put in the hours also- in a past life I studied art and traditional animation (hand-drawn) so I've learned a thing or two about framing. It has its place in a production setting where the emphasis is on finishing a drawing within a deadline, but as a teaching tool to show kids how to draw I'd really question its use.
For me the goal of teaching kids to draw should be to allow them to "unlock" their ability to communicate their experience of the world using form and colour. They should be shown the cave art from Lasceaux and Altamira, and inspired to look for their own internal representation of what their eyes can see and the ways to reproduce it on paper (or whatever medium). Not to follow closely someone else's set of lines.
So what if a kid learns to draw the same pretty butterfly, and only that one pretty buttefly, again and again and again, for ever? What has she achieved?
Here, this is the kind of art that should be taught to kids:
That's a cynical way of putting it. This kind of approach, repeated over many permutations until I have various arrangements of shapes available in muscle memory, makes for good mileage, relative to many other ways that one could practice drawing. It isn't the "only" technique, it just presents one more option.
And it is difficult to get beyond "trace these shapes" and start using abstractions of structure and proportion as a way of seeing. It's the same barrier that happens in gaining technique on a musical instrument: you can pick out some notes at the beginning, but if you want to feel really comfortable and have the fluidity to sight read or improvise, you have to start drilling scales. But once you have those skills available and try to compose, the problem is with having a stagnant reportoire, and then music theory drills gradually become more important.
But most kids do get stuck after learning a few songs.
Seconded. Drawing from life is orders of magnitude easier than illustration. You can learn to draw your own hands quite realistically in a matter of hours, from a baseline of nothing. Learning to draw a realistic human hand from memory takes years of study and practice; you need to memorise every bone, muscle and tendon, you need to understand the elasticity of skin, you need a deep intuitive understanding of perspective. If you're drawing from life, you're just transcribing lines, shapes and shading - it's basically tracing with your eyes.
Our visual memory is really very poor, because it's evolutionarily tuned to remember rough silhouettes and distinguishing characteristics rather than a complete and detailed image. People who can remember images in photographic detail are invariably autistic and invariably have serious difficulties in coping with normal life - the highly lossy compression most of us apply to sensory information is an essential survival skill.
Most professional artists can't draw purely from imagination - it's a highly specialised skill reserved for expert illustrators. They rely on reference photographs, models, mannequins, preparatory sketches and all sorts of other visual aids. Why would we try to teach children a skill that most working artists think is beyond their ability?
That's a good take on drawing from nature. My focal point on this subject is how good it feels. When you get over that bump, which like you say takes little time, you become so relaxed. I actually don't care about the drawings I make, it's the state of mind that I get from doing it that I like.
"That bump" I mention is something like changing gears in your head to see the pixels on the screen, instead of the text, windows, and other things that the pixels "make up", to use an analogy. It's actually hard to even describe this phenomenon; I guess that says something about how foreign it is to us. It's a bit like, when someone is talking, being able to distinguish the pure sounds you hear, and the interpretations you (involuntarily) attach to those sounds. When drawing in the "naturalistic" way, you want to suspend the interpretation or symbolisation of what you see.
The first time you make the shift, to me it feels like "wow, I don't know this feeling, it's great". Then you have to redo it every time you sit down to draw, and usually multiple times in the midst of a session too, because you loose focus and fall back to the symbolistic-perception mode.
The question for me is whether someone who has learned to draw some animal in this way will then be able to draw the same animal in a different pose, from a different angle, in a different style, etc.
My intution is that- no. These sort of techniques literally teach you were to place your lines. And that's the lines of a set of very specific drawings, and only those drawings, ever. It's like the difference between learning a lookup table relating numbers from 1 to n to their sums, versus learning an algorithm to sum arbitrary numbers. The kinds of learning become equivalent as the size of the lookup table approaches infinity... but since here we're talking about images of complex forms it would really have to approach infinity before it's very useful at all.
I'm also a bit concerned that this is meant to be used to teach primary school students how to draw animals. Does this sort of instruction really serve to help a child understand how to represent an animal?
And, I guess, is it really a good idea to take human beings at the very time in their lives when their relation with the world is at its most fluid and try to teach them that, no, you don't need imagination to be creative, there's this one simple trick that you can use to always get the adults to pat you on your head and say how talented you are?
Well, I personally like the approach of the article because it allows one to first get the pose correct, and all the proportions, before filling in the details (which can save a lot of work and especially frustration).
Also, if you want to draw convincing animations, then I think that a structural approach is absolutely necessary.
Because I'm coming off as cerebral myself? Haha I didn't see the conflict there when I posted, but thanks for pointing it out, and that's kind of my point: I need something to offset it, and drawing can be that thing, but it entirely depends on how you do it.
I see what you mean, you want your drawing approach to be more free-form because it lets you "take a load off" the constant categorising and logic and so on. On the other hand though, tips like those in the link could help someone to just start drawing, and might lead to making creative adjustments to those forms (like encouraging your children to try making a monster version of a deer, for example).
There's also this other dimension to it that is often overlooked, and it's behind my saying "I wouldn't teach this". The analysis and reduction based method relies on your ability to digest what you see mentally and that has limitations. For example, if you asked a child to draw a rough sea, hair on somebody's head, the clouds, the forest or whatever, he would become frustrated with the sheer complexity and probably degrade to what we call "child's drawing", which is a misnomer, since most adults draw this way. Child's drawing is when you draw symbolistically: this is a head, these are lips, this is a tree, this is a bush, etc. On the other hand, if you "draw what you see" which is another horrible term, coined by me this time, you're not bothered by complexity, you celebrate and marvel at it, in a frictionless way. Again, I'm recommending that book I linked, great stuff.
[0] https://www.drawright.com/ [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1585429201