Drawing with your kids shows them that it’s not just an artist’s endeavor. Banish the phrase, “I’m not artistic” from your mind and vocabulary, because you don’t need to be able to render a perfectly-shaded apple to be artistic.
Now. Let’s get to this fun drawing project- you can do this with kids of all ages, so it’s a fun creative family project. Throw in some popcorn and wine juice- and you have a good old-fashioned drawing party!
I originally wrote about this in my post, Drawing Games For Kids. All you need is a flashlight (or iPhone flashlight app, which works beautifully), some paper, and markers. And of course items to trace.
Someone can hold the flashlight, or you can figure out how to prop it up so it stays still. Position it so it shines at the wall where you have a taped up piece of paper.
Do a household search to find some toys or objects with interesting shapes, and prop them near the wall so their shadow falls onto the paper. You’ll have to move the object/paper around a little to find the optimal placing. We ended up using 2 stools, with the light set on the back stool, and the objects on the stool closer to the wall. Play around with how close the objects are to the wall and light.
Play around and overlap different shapes, using different colored markers for each tracing. We flipped the paper different ways on the wall when we switched objects to trace. Try to fill the paper, but decide when it’s time to stop adding shadow-tracings. This is an important lesson to learn in composition and graphic design. Is it too early to teach kids that less is more?
After you’ve traced a few shadows, you can enjoy your drawings as-is, or add to them with more markers, colored pencils, watercolors, anything goes! Glitter, maybe?
Looking for more great drawing ideas for kids? Here is a post I wrote with 100 of them!
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