Familial species.

Inspiring young children to think in new and different ways and to translate their ideas into art is an eternally exciting challenge. Kindergartners and first graders are eager to draw or paint just about anything at any time. Animals and their habitats are always popular themes; the act of creating images of all kinds on paper seems spontaneous and natural. The very young draw people with eagerness, without concern for how they look to observers. But by second grade, students already tend to have some difficulty when it comes to drawing people, because they are overly anxious about making things appear in their art as they, with growing sophistication, see them in real life. The concepts of scale and proportion have crept into their consciousness and they can feel discouraged or defeated when asked to do drawings of their families which had come so easily to them when they were in kindergarten.

Rather than pressuring the seven-and eight-year-olds to tackle art concepts like perspective and proportion that they would come across soon enough, I hoped to satisfy their longing to draw their families without imposing limitations on their fresh, creative spirits and uninhibited visions. Because they still derived pleasure from drawing animals, I wanted to harness that remaining enthusiasm and incorporate it into a new idea.

Having exhausted the practice of asking children to simply draw their favorite animal or pet, I decided to approach the task from a fresh angle by trying a project that I hoped would advance their capacities for abstract thinking. The students would be asked to stretch their fanciful imagination to re-creating their family members in animal form.

The first task was to do some in-depth thinking: What qualities and attributes come to mind when you think of yourself, your siblings, your mother, father or other significant adults? What are the traits that most stick out in your mind? Interesting discussions ensued--brothers who were perceived as "always silly and fooling around," sisters who were "little and in the way a lot" or parents who were "fun and playful" or "bossy and acted like they knew everything." The children were encouraged to think in complex terms rather than all-positive or all-negative statements. The next step was to think of the characteristics of any animal--real or imaginary--that best fit their descriptions of each person. The silly one might be a monkey and the know-it-all an owl or lion, king of the beasts. A quiet family member could be depicted as a mouse, and a sports-oriented, active relative as a cheetah or gazelle. The students were enthusiastic about the prospect of turning their families into animals, and it was a less threatening and more exciting proposition than drawing people as they appear. They were not restricted to re-creating one person as one animal, but were free to draw part-giraffe, part-cat or part-bird, for instance.

We first worked in pencil on 18 x 24" (46 x 61 cm) white drawing paper, and the children were reminded that one of our aims was to fill the page in an interesting way. Their people-as-animals need not be to scale, and an elephant could be dwarfed by a bird overhead, if they chose.

The students outlined the key forms in black marker before using oil pastels, crayons and watercolor paints.

It was fascinating to see how each student interpreted the project in his or her own way, and the environment in which they set up their final work. Eight-year-old Jeremy depicted his mother as a large, woolly sheep grazing in a peaceful meadow; he was a big flea "because sometimes she tells me I get on her back." His father was a tiger perched atop a distant mountain overseeing the scene without active involvement. Some spontaneously drew themselves as the dominant animal, while others simply forgot to include themselves or other members entirely. The project unexpectedly became an interesting study in family dynamics, and it deepened my understanding of the students and their feelings. Very few of them chose to draw their families as one species--for example, a mother and father cat with kittens--and sizes and placements of the figures seemed meaningful as well. As an only child of divorced parents, Amy depicted her absent father as a magical unicorn in flight; she was a meek little mouse and her mother behind her was a bunny looking up at the unicorn passing overhead.

Whether or not you choose to attend to any psychological implications that emerge from this project, the most important element is that the students were genuinely excited about having the opportunity to think about and draw their families from a new angle. It involved an in-depth exploration of abstract thinking and resulted in colorful, captivating works of art. Each child seemed to feel very satisfied with his or her private, novel expression, and we learned a lot about one another in the process.