By Yasodhara Pathanjali
Hello everyone! How was last week for you? Did you catch me on the Live session on Little Stars’ Facebook page on 22 May? We had a great session and spoke about how we can use art to relax and reduce our worries. If you have any drawings from last week’s topic, do send them to us so that we can share them here in the coming weeks for all our readers to enjoy.
Today, we will talk about how art and creativity can help you to build a better world. A lot of people think that art is just done for fun, or that it is not very useful. But, actually, art and creativity are super important in problem-solving, new discoveries, and progress.
Let me explain. When you start to work on your art, either by drawing or writing or filmmaking or designing; whichever way you create your own things, you are working through your imagination. When you have a really good imagination, you can look at the world in a new way. And this can help you find new ways of doing things. It all comes from imagination.
So every time you draw your own thing, without copying from somewhere else or using other pictures as a reference, it helps you to be even better at doing amazing things.
When I was small, I used to have a drawing book where I drew pictures of a whole country I had imagined; from what their buildings looked like to their language, to their clothing. I even used to draw the machines they used for farming and to travel in. All those things I drew were completely different to how things are in our real world. I went into great detail and used to create big city scenes.
Here are my tips for really exploring your imagination and developing it through drawing:
- Don’t copy from cartoons or storybooks or other things that you have seen. Those pictures are from someone else’s imagination – you need to grow yours
- Draw anything that comes to mind. There are no right or wrong things to draw. If your imagination shows you a purple flying cow, then bring that to life on paper
- Instead of drawing a single thing, make it part of a bigger world; create a story in your mind about it, then you can keep coming back to it every time you feel like drawing more
- Your drawings don’t have to make sense to others, it’s okay if they don’t understand
- Not all drawings have to be about things; sometimes they can be just about colour or movement or feeling