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Fascinating academic article (via @mrphoenix) on drawing as language.
Highlights the importance of gaining mental tools through copying pictures, and implies that children would benefit from regular exposure to comics and being given the drawing tools to imitate them. https://twitter.com/visual_linguist/status/1344648289594060801
Highlights the importance of gaining mental tools through copying pictures, and implies that children would benefit from regular exposure to comics and being given the drawing tools to imitate them. https://twitter.com/visual_linguist/status/1344648289594060801
Thatās why I started @StudioTeaBreak #PortraitChallenge. I saw adults shaming children for copying pictures, telling them to ābe creativeā. But in copying, children were mentally picking apart a picture into its building blocks, engaging with established techniques, learning.
Trying to keep children from copying pictures is like telling them at their first piano lesson not to play music composed by other people. So no Suzuki, no Mozart or Chopin, no need to learn to read music. Most children would understandably get bored of their own compositions.
Of course, this is a completely different issue from adults copying the work of others thatās still within its term of copyright and selling it commercially. Commercial art is about gathering so many combined influences that our work becomes something new and unique.
This is learning of the absolute best kind 
https://twitter.com/mikephi97231594/status/1345694179096203264
https://twitter.com/mikephi97231594/status/1345694179096203264
Even as a professional artist, if Iām standing in front of an amazing picture, my brain doesnāt really take it all in, understand how it was made, or remember the important bits to take away. I only internalise it when I sketch it out, a sort of rehearsal of what its artist did.
Talking with other artists, we seem to store influences and picture memories differently. Some store them coherently in their mindās eye and try to replicate what they see. I donāt, itās more like I āthinkā out of my hand: my eyes watch the paper, my brain then analyses, adjusts
The article has knots of academic jargon that can be hard to get through, but I recommend skimming those bits and plugging on, thereās really interesting stuff in there on how our brains work.
Following from the article, I wonder if thereās a connection between English-language youthās obsession with Japanese/Korean pop culture and its embrace of homogeneity. Our ābe creativeā scope is too wide/unguided and they crave building blocks of a common visual language(?)
Thereās fear when you first start out in art, expected to come up with original pictures when you donāt have the life experience or enough exposure & internalisation of art to get good ideas. I can see the appeal of working to an established code, that art colleges wouldnāt offer
Which means perhaps our local art training could be less afraid of real āteachingā, not so much of this āspace to learnā (which of course is much easier to offer on a low budget). Thereās nothing wrong with showing kids how to get results from art materials. They can adapt later.
Disclaimer: Iām no expert at this! Going back to the article source: https://twitter.com/visual_linguist/status/1345704309133074432
