But around the age of 6 or 7, a self-critical voice emerges and if their drawings do not look as realistic as they want …or as their neighbors…they are soon discouraged. Most assume they are NOT artists because they “can’t draw”. Many become art phobic, never venturing (at least voluntarily) into an art class again. Rarely do they understand that drawing is just like other subjects; there is a method that can be mastered, just like arithmetic, language, science, etc.
With a little instruction and practice, the outcome is quite different. ArtWise would like to “catch” students just before that critical voice develops, teach them basic drawing skills and instill confidence that they will carry with them through out their lives. Drawing truly can deliver improved math understanding, expanded language skills, confident artistic sensibilities, stronger and better fine motor skills…
it is rare to discover an activity with such wide ranging benefits that kids think is fun!
Many argue that sophisticated visual skills are as critical to our children’s future as language skills have been to our past and present. Here is what journalist and researcher, Robert L. Lindstrom has to say:
"We live in a world awash in visual information,
and we love it. For humans, ingesting information visually is a biological piece of cake. We're designed for it. Our perceptions of the world, the information we take in, as well as the signals we send out are overwhelmingly visual in nature. We think and dream in pictures and symbolic images. We replay and recreate life visually in our heads. Even when we read we transform the words into mental pictures. We all have little Spielbergs in our brains that give us insights and lead us to understanding by building models and crafting visual stories.Visually we pull in and send out far more information through our eyes
than all our other senses combined. We observe the complex facial expressions, eye movements and body language of the speaker. We take in the details of the environment. We make a visual note of clothing items and grooming habits as we scan and memorize the facial and physical characteristics of others.The reason we are so visually oriented is purely a case of human physiology.
Of all our sense receptors, our eyes are by far our most powerful information conduit to the brain. The retina of the human eye, which is actually an outgrowth of the brain itself, contains 150 million rod and cone cells for detecting changes in light and color. Those receptors send information to the cerebral cortex through two optic nerves consisting of one million nerve fibers each. By comparison, each auditory nerve consists of a mere 30,000 fibers. Neurons (nerve cells) devoted to visual processing number in the hundreds of millions and account for about 30 percent of the cortex of the brain, compared to a mere 8 percent of neurons devoted to touch and a paltry 3 percent for hearing.With all that bandwidth to the brain, it is no wonder we perceive the world and communicate in visual terms. We read five times as fast as the average person talks. We register a full-color image, the equivalent of a megabyte of data, in a fraction of a second. When we watch a video, we are seeing about 24 to 30 megabytes of visual information per second. From that data we are able to distinguish remarkable details of depth, color, light and motion."
Excerpted from BEING VISUAL, By Robert L. Lindstrom.