Drawing for kids

5 min readJun 8, 2020

Drawing is the art or technique of representing an object or plan or sketch. It’s a form of communication that can tell stories, educate, entertain, and inspire.

Children love to draw and they are naturally curious and imaginative. The world around them is new to understand. They try to draw what they see, what they feel, and what they imagine.

Teaching a child to draw is mostly a question of observing their progress and offering them new methods of exploration. To begin the training, observation of their drawings is important. We should teach them to think of pictures and the way they like to draw them. Younger children may not necessarily be taught drawing, rather we can give them the right tools(colors, crayons, finger paints) and allow them to use how they like.

Make drawing part of their routine

Children will begin their drawings by scribbling. Provide them a variety of art materials and encourage them to try while playing. As part of the play, they can draw by tracing pictures on the paper or sand, shaping clay, coloring with watercolors, or color pencils.

Don’t teach

Sit along with the children when they are drawing. Talk to them about their drawing. Ask them to explain all the pictures they have drawn. Don’t attempt to teach. If you try to correct them, they will slowly lose confidence. We should encourage them to express themselves freely and use their imagination.

Make observations

Instead of correcting the child’s drawing observe the way they are attempting. Comment on the process but not the pictures. After completing their drawing say “I like the way you draw” or “ Your butterfly looks very beautiful” or “The flowers and trees you drawn reminds me the park we went yesterday.”

Ask for explanation

When a child shows their picture avoid questioning “what is it?”, instead we can say them “This looks amazing, can you tell me more about this drawing?” This motivates the child and they will start talking about their pictures. The more you engage, the more they will try to improvise their drawings. Slowly they will start imagining a story before they start drawing.

For example, if the child is drawing a park, they might draw a few children playing slide or swing, grass, etc,. If we start asking did we see only grass, then they may draw some trees. If we ask if there’s only a slide or swing in the play area, they might add some more there. Ask what we were playing with and they may draw ball and bat also.

These kinds of genuinely interesting questions will encourage their drawing skills, imagination, storytelling abilities.

Encourage the child to observe things

Train children in observing things and draw them. This helps them to learn how to draw new things. Encourage them to observe lower-level details like texture, color, shape, curves, lines, relative sizes (for example, how big is petal in the flower). The more they observe the more attention to the detail their drawings will be. Gently discourage using an eraser as much as possible.

Drawing new objects

Instead of repeating the drawings, they have already learned like houses, flowers, trees ask them to try new pictures they never tried. This makes them to sharpen their thinking.

For example, children generally tend to draw a sunflower whenever they draw a flower, but we can ask them to try different ones like tulips, roses, lilies. Similarly, when they draw a car, we can ask them to try for buses, trains, etc,.

Next time when they draw a park, then they will try to add different types of flowers a car parking, a bus going nearby.

Drawing and Writing

Children before starting their pictures they imagine a story and then they start to draw. After completing their picture if we ask them to tell about their art they start to tell about it. While telling they may add more things to their story. This will help them to improve their storytelling abilities. If we ask them to write about their pictures they will start writing. While writing they may learn new words, spellings, and sentence formations. This will help in improving writing skills.

Techniques of drawing

Children first start to draw scribbles then they try to draw small pictures. While teaching, make sure they learn to draw circles(moving the pencil in circles), up and down, back and forth, zigzag, wiggles, and dots. With these, they can draw most of their pictures. Make them learn shapes like circle, square, rectangle, triangle, and ask them to draw something they know by using these shapes. For example, if they learn to draw a circle we can ask them to draw something they know and they may draw a ball or sun. Then we can show some more pictures to draw or can give some ideas about how to draw, with the shapes they learned.

Kids love to draw and they draw what they love. Drawing is a natural creative activity. Encourage them and assist them and they will create amazing art.

“Every picture tells a story.”

“Anyone can learn how to draw.”