Ellie's Art II

Drawing with Ellie has quickly become one of my favorite things to do.

Let me clarify... For the most part, Ellie does not come up with the drawings herself. We sit down and she tells me what she wants to draw. I then give her instructions like "First we need a circle for the body" and "now we need a straight line from this point to this point." She does what I tell her to do. It's a challenge for both of us. Sometimes it's hard for her to do what I instruct her to do, especially if it's a complicated picture. And sometimes it's hard for me to turn the results of her doing exactly what I requested into the picture she wanted.

The more we practice, the better she gets. For example, she now knows how to draw grass and she knows that we almost always start with a circle for the body. And she usually puts in the eyes, mouth and hair without being told how. If I provide dots for her, she has very little trouble whooping from one to the next to make things like trees or clouds. She knows that if she draws a bunch of straight lines in different colors then it becomes a rainbow.

But the rest of the details, she still relies on me to show her the tricks. Regardless, I love it. I love showing her that she can accomplish something. I love the pride she gets when we finish a picture and it actually LOOKS like the animal we set out to draw. And I love seeing how quickly she learns and how every time she does a little more on her own.

Anyway, without further ado... here is the next batch of pictures from Ellie's drawing pad:

Hot air balloon, complete with surrounding clouds. Ellie drew the balloon with stripes and basket. I colored in the balloon and she colored the basket. Then she decided the picture needed clouds.

Our second tree. She likes the "whooping" action I showed her (the trick to making trees, flowers and clouds). Again the tree includes a door for the squirrels but this time it also has different colored apples. Ellie helped me color in the apples and she colored the trunk. One thing I've noticed about her drawing is that often times she doesn't think about changing colors before drawing something else (note the brown apple... she drew it after the brown trunk). I wonder how much this plays into her not being able to draw pictures on her own yet?

And here is our octopus. Note the eyes and smile and lots of hair. Ellie insisted that the octopus had lots of hair. This is another good example of how she doesn't think to change colors when she draws something new. See how the smile is the same color as the eyes? You can hardly tell it's there. It's just an interesting insight about the thought-process of a three year old drawing pictures.

Oh, this is the one I'm most excited about! Bun Bun! We drew this on the plane to Pappy's house and it turned out so much better than I had hoped for! She did it all! I instructed her on what to do, but she did all the work, including coloring her in. I love the fact that we included Bun Bun's whiskers and even a flower on the pink part of the blanket. This is by far my favorite drawing to date. LOVE it.

And sadly, though not surprising, after Bun Bun Ellie just started losing patience or motivation. Here's a frog, though it started out as a monkey. Ellie drew the body, head and eyes and helped me color it in. I drew the hands, legs and pupils. She just did not want to finish it herself.

Same for our parrot, Maggie (Grammie's bird). Ellie drew the body, legs and two tail feathers before giving up. I'm thinking we need to take a break for a while. After drawing nearly every evening for a couple weeks, I'm sure Ellie needs to take a step back and do some other activity. Really, I can't blame her for that. We've drawn a TON of pictures in a short time!