For those of us with children, we know that just raising a kid is challenge enough.
Even while we're raising them, though, we are unintentionally (or intentionally) teaching them how to be adults. Our frustrations, our stresses, our joys, our interests, our hang-ups... our kids are learning from it all. But are we teaching them to be successful artists?
All of us who are now in creative industries know how much of a struggle it is to finally get where you wanted to go. Maybe your direction changed at some point, maybe you spent two years completely side-tracked, or maybe others in your chosen industry tried to hold you back. Whatever your story, we can all agree that we would be so much further ahead if we had been able to foresee some of the speed-bumps along the way.
So now that you're a self-acknowledged artist (and hopefully a successful one), what are the things you wish you would have known? What are the skills that you wish you'd been taught much earlier on? What mindsets would have served you better when you were younger, with respect to your career?
The answers to these questions are the basis for teaching our children how to be better, more successful artists in their lifetimes. They have the chance we may not have, to learn firsthand the ups and downs of being a professional artist.
Personally, my five-year-old has taken a huge interest in both Legend of Zelda (Ocarina of Time, of course) and drawing. I couldn't be more thrilled and proud of her. We have "drawing parties" when we have free time together. And when we draw, I encourage her shape-building, I congratulate her on her awesome facial expressions, and without me teaching her how, she's recently begun creating comics with panels to illustrate events.
Drawing skills (or whatever your skill is) alone, though, do not make the artist. The artist knows how to use his or her skill to their advantage. How to differentiate between personal art and commissioned art. Between self-expression and creative design. And there are simple ways we can begin to teach them these things.
When my girl comes home from school with a bad behavior report, for instance, her first duty is to make a comic to illustrate what happened and why. Recreating these events visually is doing many things for her. It's distancing her from the events so that she can understand them from the third-person perspective. In this sense, she is illustrating. She is channeling the human dynamic into pictures. She is learning how to tell stories, how to make sense of the human drama, and most importantly how to look at and portray the world around her in her own unique style.
There are so many more small activities like this that we can introduce into our children's lives that will mentally prepare them for life as an artist. Even when reading a picture book with them, we can steer their focus from the morals of the story to the construction of the writing, the colors the artist chose, and on and on. We can approach life with them in this way, showing them that everything around us is something that someone created. We can pay them in gummy bears to create artistic commissions for us. We can have weeks where we encourage them to only draw one thing or another, and then show them their progress as they improve.
These are the skills we, as starving artists in our teen years, would have benefitted from on a massive level. To be creative is part of being an artist, but knowing how to direct our creativity is the next step. That is one of many things your kid doesn't know yet about life as an artist. Take the opportunity to be their first art teacher.
