So how does our brain work?

It is funny how our hands connect to our brain, and our brain connect to our thoughts, ideas and memories. Today in all of my drawing classes, we completed a fun little project that always makes my students think about art a little different.

When we are young, we are bombarded with these colorful picture books that have, for instance, a picture of a bright beach ball with the word ball below, on the following pages, the same ideas exist. We start at a young age learning to put pictures of objects into our brains so that the minute that we hear a word, we have an image. This is an amazing process. As we get a little older our memories develop more and we add more detail to the initial symbol we learned.

The trouble is that when students are asked to draw, for instance a sunflower, they still draw a simplified child-like drawing of a sunflower. In their head they may see wonderful colors and lots of beautiful petals, but what goes on the paper is a circle surrounded with oval shapes that they were taught as a child. It is almost like we can't seem to get our memory to match up to our hands and drawing.

My goal this year is to help students begin to see, remember, and create more realistic ideas. I am excited to see their style progress and gain a wonderful sense of detail! The key is that we need to look at an object to remember what it looks like as we draw it, not trying to draw from memory. Hard concept to grasp, but I know we can do it!