Creativity begins with colouring

so that the young ones fill in with colour.
I find colouring books to be a good introduction to art and creativity, and encourages the children to make choices on colour, texture, contrast and intensity.
However, continued use of colouring books beyond the introductory stages of art may be retrogressive and harmful to the child’s art development. How is one expected to be creative under a strict code of conduct that has a limited room for manoeuvring?
The practice of filling a prescribed form or shape may be fun at the beginning, but turns to be monotonous and if repeated several times. The natural progression for a young artist should start with the colouring book. Once he/she is competent and disciplined enough to intelligently use different colour variations within the stipulated parameters, it should be time for them to start developing a drawing technique.
Naturally, most children, especially those interested in art are close followers of television cartoon characters, and every generation has its favourites.
Today, the most famous and perhaps most loved are the likes of Johnny Bravo, Ben 10, Shrek, Puss in Boots, Kung Fu Panda, Powerpuff Girls, and even the more adult-orientated South Park and Boondocks characters.
Other kids prefer to be more inclined towards comic book heroes, particularly those given more vivid life through motion pictures and animation, such as Spiderman, Superman, the Fantastic Four, Incredible Hulk and the Batman.
Whatever they choose, it is vital that they copy from characters they are passionate about. Some distinguished artists today concede that they were inspired and had their styles molded by the cartoon characters of their day.
Drawing characters based from beloved television shows would give children the chance to come up with images of their own, and an option too to fill in the colours. This may be taken as part of the developmental stage where a child begins by copying the characters from television or magazines and ends by drawing the same characters from memory. The part where children directly copy images mostly develops the relationship between the eye and the hand, and comes in handy later in still life and observation drawing techniques.
But the more vital relationship has to be the one between the mind and the hand. After mastering drawing cartoons and other images from observation and imagination, the next phase must involve developing their own imagery without copying.
That is the stage that prepares children to become real artists and how quickly they develop and adjust determines whether or not their future lies in the field.
Certainly, everyone is an artist at a young age, and in fact, schools and parents insist that their children take art lessons. But not everyone will dedicate their lives to, or make a decent living through art. Based on how they fare, it is when children start to draw from their imagination that some may be encouraged to develop further, and some perhaps persuaded to concentrate on other things.
If one cannot be creative, chances of success in the artworld are close to zero. That is because just about every form of art requires high levels of imagination and innovation. Take stone sculpture for example, which is subtractive by nature. The sculptor finds a life “trapped” inside the stone and devises a method of removing the “waste” surrounding it, in the process “rescuing” a masterpiece.
Without imagination, one therefore can not be considered a sculptor. The same imagination “principle” applies to other forms of art including architecture, strip, editorial and comic cartooning, fashion design, photography, theatre design, industrial design and ceramic art.
In relation to cartooning, during my 13 years in the print media, I have met countless teens stressing that they are artists. But their portfolios would be filled with little else besides drawings of their favourite artists or sports stars.
The lack of imagination in their work means that they cannot do any more than draw the same person or thing over and over again and with very little variation, evidence that somewhere along the line, they stopped developing as artists and started circling around a developmental stage just before creative juices start flowing.
Needless to say, unless one is extraordinarily good with wildlife, fine art or still life drawing, there is no point in being in the profession if creativity is lacking.
Some critics say drawing images to near real-life proportions and stature is now irrelevant, since the invention of the camera because the photographic device can to the same job better, cheaper and in record time.
The challenge for today’s artist is to retain relevance by creating what an appliance or programme, including photoshop cannot do. It is fair and fine for artists to incorporate digital apparatus in their work, but traditional and conventional ways of creating art still have a place in today’s society.
Development of future artists starts at a tender age and failure to continuously raise their bar so that the children understand that there is more to art than creating a replica of Scooby Doo or Alex the Lion stifles development.
Their minds should develop solid partnerships with the eyes and more importantly, with the hands so that whatever is visualised in the brain may be easily transferred and transformed into a physical form perceptible to others.
But, as Spiderman would put it, power come with greater responsibility, therefore it is imperative that parents and guardians monitor children’s thoughts and products of their creativity. There is a danger that limitless imagination may degenerate into dark dangerous territory that questions, or even reject traditions and values that bind our society together.
Creativity can sometime become too much that the artist gains the ability to bring some of the mental creations to life, in his/her head anyway. Those are some of the people we see talking, laughing and arguing with themselves. The bottom line is the children should not be eternally boxed such that their art is limited to creating mere variations of art that already exist.
Instead, they should be allowed to develop, be given freedom to imagine and experiment, but not beyond the generally acceptable parameters of the society in which they are part of.