Exercises to Teach Kids How to Draw with Their Imagination from Memory by Illustrating Pictures

Simple Pictures Illustrating for Kids

Simple Story Pictures Illustrating the Months

The value of these exercises consists largerly in fostering the inventive faculty of the child, in bringing out his individual ingenuity. The teacher should let the pupil depind on his own imagination entirely, afterwards suggesting improvements and pointingout the most obvious errors.

The Subjects.

The stories illustrated may be original or from suggestions offered by simple nursery tales and rhymes. For instance.

John flew a kite, but the wind was so strong that the string broke and the kite fell towards the ground. But it never re\ached the ground. It was caught in a tree and stayed there for a long time, so long, that there was nothing left of the kite except a few rotting sticks. Did John cry? No, he went home and made another kite.

To illustrate this, one or more pictures may be made.

Examples: A boy flying a kite. The kite falling (upside down). The kite lodged in a tree.

Reverse the Operation.

For instance, draw a picture and write a little story about it.

As for example: A picture of a bird feeding a little bird in a nest. The story: “One day a bird fed its little one and then flew away to get another meal, but the mother bird never came back. A bad boy threw a stone at it just as it was picking up a nice little worm for the birdling’s lunch. Wouldn’t the bad little boy feel sorry if he knew that the little bird in the nest starved to death because its mother never came back?”

Many of the Mother Goose Melodies provide easy, yet interesting, material for simple illustrations. See the below example of Mother Goose Rhymes and Melodies Simply Illustrated.

Anniversaries & Holidays - On holidays, national anniversaries and other seasonable occasions, or rather for some days preceeding them, it is a lot of fun to draw the symbols and pictures by which these events and persons are commemorated. For example,

JANUARY and New Year's Day suggests Father' Time, his scythe and hour glass. The New Year itself, as portrayed by a child, illustrating the new born year with the date somewhere in the picture. Good resolutions—someone writing in a diary, etc.

FEBRUARY represents Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays as subjects, besides Valentine's day. Events in the lives of the two great patriots are good subjects, or simply their portraits, or other symbols such as a hatchet and a cherry tree trunk, or a rail fence or broken shackles, made into frame—as the case may be.

SEPTEMBER—Draw Autumn flowers, such as the goldeu-rod, sunflower, and others found in your locality, grasses, grains, bushes and trees.

OCTOBER—Draw fruits, Autumn leaves, pumpkins, ghosts, goblins, and Jack-o'-lanterns.

NOVEMBER.—Draw objects suggested by Thanksgiving—The Mayflower, Indians, wigwams, turkeys and corn.

DECEMBER.—Subjects suggested by Winter Snow, Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, such as Christmas trees, stars, holly, Menorrah, Kinara, Santa Claus and reindeer, toys of all kinds.

JANUARY.—Eskimo huts, snow forts, snow men, snow crystals, skating and coasting.

FEBRUARY.—Subjects suggested by Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays and Valentine Day.

MARCH.—Draw kites, windmills, boats and pussy-willows. APRIL.—Draw buds and twigs, tulips and other early Spring flowers, umbrellas, ducks.

MAY.—Draw May-baskets, birds and their nests and eggs, trees, flowers and simple landscapes.

JUNE.—Draw flowers, vacation scenes, landscapes.

Have Fun Illustrating Pictures that have no captions.

Here are three suggestions for simple story pictures:

It is fun to mae up stories and then illustrate them. But have you ever tried to look at a picture that you didn't draw, like the ones above, and then write the caption. This is an exercise in creativity and is a lot of fun. You might want to even try to make up a funny caption, just like a cartoonist