Children Drawing
In this Thinkprint, the video clips zoom in on three different children drawing flowers and people’s heads. One child wants the hair on her person’s head to have a "part" so it will look like hair instead of a hat. Another child wants to represent the density of grass, so she shifts from rounded to spiky waves. A third child wants to represent the diversity of flowers in color and size.
Observation of children’s drawing offers us an opportunity to see children "reinvent" common objects and thereby to see what children know. Their choices represent a form of graphic literacy that is analogous to expressing thoughts in print. Furthermore, when we watch a video clip in real-time, we are able to study the narrative and sequence of the drawing process, information missed when we look only at the finished drawing.
Watch how the artist turns the paper to improve the control of her strokes. Notice how she first makes an outline of the hair in order to fill it in, but then shifts to deliberately making strokes outside of the outline to represent the more "fly away" character of hair. Intelligence can be best observed as skill is applied over the temporal flow of work, inventing nuance along the way.
Length of Thinkprint: 17 paragraphs, 13 video subclips
Lenght of stand-alone master video clip: 1 minute 59 seconds
