Drawing with your toddler on Photoshop
What do you reckon to this art, then? A nice abstract with some graffiti influences, eh? Reminiscent of a wild hedgerow, with a clever use of colours that mimics lavender and lilac blossom? An admirable loose line, harking back to the carefree days of childhood -
- ah. That’s a clue. The picture above is the result of my setting up Tabitha (who will be aged two and a half in three days’ time) in front of Photoshop with a graphics tablet.
I may live to regret this. She enjoyed it altogether too much, and of course, I want to be the one on the computer most of the time. Her job is to look cute and ask for biscuits occasionally. And, although fortunately enough graphics tablets are pretty tough equipment, I was still quaking with fear the whole time she had her sticky mitts on mine.
On the other hand, it was a slight eureka moment. She’s too young to have any mouse control yet, but she’s so well-used to pens and crayons that the digital stylus was no problem for her.
Plus, no mess. That’s a big plus.
If you want to tread the same path, here are my learnings:
1) Make a big canvas (file>new). The biggest possible is 30,000 pixels wide, but you don’t need that much. Say, 2,000 pixels square. Why big? Because toddlers haven’t yet learned to stop at the edge, so you need some leeway for their line to just keep right on going.
2) Select a nice thick brush or pencil and a bright colour, and then close all the floating toolbars (window>hide whatever). Basically, once your kid gets going, it’s going to be chaos. Closing these windows is the equivalent of getting everyone out of a town before a hurricane hits. Otherwise, your child will accidentally pick them up, drag and drop them, change your lovingly-selected settings, and, when no line comes out of their pen, wail, ‘Mu-u-u-u-u-m.’
Talking of which, it’s amazing (I think so, anyway) how quickly a child gets the hang of writing on one surface (the tablet), and seeing the line come out elsewhere (the screen). It took Tabitha about 0.00000001 seconds.
For nice effects, pick some of the more esoteric brushes like the star shape or circle. These are easy to overlook; if you click on the arrow top right in your brushes palette (and I’m talking Photoshop for PCs, version 6.0*) you’ll see approximately eight brush selections, each ending in .abr. Some mimic real brush types, others give you handy graphics at the click of your mouse or pen.
Play about with the drop down ‘mode’ and the slider ‘opacity’ too. A word of warning, though - do all this before your impatient toddler sits down, or you’ll have no chance.
3) Every now and again, change the colour, and, if you are an over-ambitious mum like me, and if your child will let you, do a ’save as’ so you can share their work with friends and family.
Now, I know I’m biased, but I am absolutely positive that some of these scrawls, blown up onto a high-quality canvas, would sell for millions in the right gallery.
Also, as usual, there’re lessons here even for those without kids. If you want a task for today, and you have access to Photoshop or similar, it’s time to find your inner child (shudder) , or, in other words, just have fun with some big thick brushes (300 pixels wide, hooo boy), some bright colours, and some brush-types it wouldn’t normally occur to you to choose.
* which is obviously what I happen to have installed. I am a PC user, and although I have used Macs in the past, I don’t know enough about them to give both sides of the story. I recommend a ‘how-to’ book which caters for both PCs and Macs on my brand new Recommended Books page, though, so this is a good opportunity to send you there.
Posted: July 2nd, 2007 under Media, Drawing with kids.
Comments: 33
33 Comments
Sorry, comments have now been closed for this page. Please use the form on the Contact page if you wish to make a comment.
I totally agree about introducing a small child to drawing on a graphics tablet… I would recommend that any parent looking at purchasing a tablet think about a smallish Wacom Graphire… I got 32 of these for the high school Digital Design class I was teaching, and I think they hold up remarkably well (they suffered plenty of abuse in class!). They have a shiny plastic surface that can be degreased easily, and they have survived the “drop test.”
(The Intuos tablet I just purchased (on the other hand) seems like it should be treated with care.)
However, since I also teach kids (toddlers and up) fine art classes, I know how much they love squishy fingerpaints, textures, tempera paints, and glue. I recommend this just as heartily, tho messy, indeed.
Thanks for your insight! My tablet is a Wacom too (not entirely sure which model since I’m not at my home desk just now), and yes, it does seem pretty tough - touch wood.
I just look a look at your website. Wonderful : I love the coffee house portraits. What a good idea, too; you get to relax and drink coffee as well as creating art.
Every Monday I vow to start joining in, so when I saw the subject I felt an initial wave of relief - I don’t have a toddler (my son is 33!)!!! Then I got to the sting in the tail and now have no excuse…. ;(
I was on a train yesterday sitting across from a mother and toddler and apart from the running commentry (’sheep!’, ‘look, cows’, ‘oooh blue car!’ ‘ducks!’) interspreced with mobile phone calls to hubby (’we’re just coming into Polegate’) I noticed the kid had a nifty Bob the Builder etch-a-sketch style toy (probably electronic) onto which he was doodling in B&W. I want one!!!
BTW a tip i got off th’internet (thanks John Nez) was to get some of that clear plastic sheet used to bind reports etc and tape it along one edge to the front of your Wacom to avoid damaging the surface
fred
Aha, I will now magically bring together both your blog post for today, and your comment here, by showing you this. Personally I find it hard enough to get to grips with the limitations of a graphics tablet, so forget about the further limitations of the Etch-a-sketch.
Nice to see your first picture here! And we do not endorse parental nagging of children to produce grandchildren just so that you can obtain someone to do the Drawanyway tasks with, but if all else fails it might be the only route open to you…
‘View from a train’ Drawing by my inner child, using mouse (never drawn in photoshop before, honest!), Photoshop 7 on iMac
fred
Heeeheee what a great task! I shall get on to it straight away as I’m on lunch at work, on a mac with a huuuuuuge screen :D yum yum
Fred your effort is lovely, brings back the days of when I was young and had our first family computer, and for hours and hourse I’d be drawing cats or whatever on microsoft paint. Then getting shouted at for printing them out and wasting ink cos it was entirely cyan or something :D
Ok here we are:
Mooooohahahahahaha!! It’s a neon rave! Hippy-tastic man!
Ah I had such fun doing this. I often use lots of the crazy brushes but I discovered a few more… look at the ikkle ghost duckys! ^.^ I also tried inverting it…
^.^
Duckies! I had no idea! Must scuttle off and try that for myself. I like the garlands of flowers, too.
The ducks are in the ’special brushes’ bit, as are the flowers and the butterflies I think. The flowers are awesome because they come out different colours :)
I’m addicted to doing this now, i’ve done about 4 lmao
how come my ducks keep coming out transparent?
fred
That’s just how they are, they’re ghost duckies.
SWIZZ! I haven’t got ’special brushes’ here at work. maybe they turn it off to stop us mucking about.
You might be able to dig it out. Right:
Go to the brush tool. and click on the arrow to bring up the menu.
Click Load Brushes…
In that window find where photoshop application is saved, click on it.
Should be a folder called Presets, click on that.
Then should be a folder called brushes.
All the brush presets should be in there… if it’s not then they didn’t include it when they installed photoshop unfortunately.
p.s. check out all the comments! :P
Wow, thanks - you taught me something new! (It’s not there, though…) And yeah, hooray, comments are back! Back! Back!
Haha, I had a mental image of you throwing your head back and laughing manically when you said “back! back!” :P (even though I know not of what you look like)
Yeah, that’s where you can save your own brush presets too, if you’ve made your own brushes.
Dunno if you know about how to make your own brushes or not, if you or anyone is curious then I can do a quick tutorial and you can post it, if you do a photoshop tutorial based post one day? It’s really easy and super cool.
Aw, that sound buh-rilliant! Yeah, that whole side of things is completely unknown to me. I am planning to write a bit about Photoshop techniques, but only the basic ways I use it, and I would learn a lot from a tutorial, too. So, yes, please!
Cool, I shall get on to it :)
Hehe look the posts get tinier and tinier! I wonder what happens if you keep on replying, do the boxes just get like, 1 character wide? hmmm
Heh, for once I know the answer to this question! After a certain number of comments it says ‘comments do not nest after this point’. Boo, spoilsport, eh?
Oh I just got the best image in my head from that:
‘comments do not nest after this point.’
:(
BAH! Your image seems not to be where it oughta.
Oh yeah =/ I uploaded it to photobucket from work and now it seems to have disappeared from my account. Poo! I can’t get it back either as today was my last day. Sigh.
Wonder why it’s done that. Oh well. It was a cute quick thing in photoshop of lots of comments in a twig nest. I’ll do it again later if I can be bothered.
Thanks for sorting my posts out Myf! The Bob The Builder toy had an etch-a-sketch on his tummy, like a Tellytubby! I just remembered I once won a prize many years ago for doing a Kandinsky copy on a BBC computer (anyone old enough to remember those?) — I had to take a photo off the screen to send in to the magazine!
fred (computer art pioneer)
Ha ha, Tabitha would love that; she’d love it even more if it actually was a Teletubby. Love the idea of photographing the screen - but I am certainly old enough not to think that’s completely ridiculous.
Here’s mine - no toddlers, I’m afraid, just me. I did some playing around first of all (Gimp has a “green pepper” brush! Yes, honestly! It draws little green peppers!) and then discovered a brush I liked. I drew a chaise-longue with it, but then decided to take one of the legs off and turn it into a bird. It’s a bit wobbly because I had to use the trackpad.
Lovely! It’s worth clicking through, readers (!) because you can see the feathery effect on the tail. For some reason I’m thinking this would make a nice illustration on a wine label.
Aw that’s pretty… and I kind of agree about the wine label comment too.
I want to see the green pepper! Do a pepper-themed crazy montage!
I’m not very good at crazy, but here is a green pepper montage! Click through for a more readable version.
That’s so cool! Haha awesome. Mmmm pizza ^.^
L’s nursery have an ancient PC in a corner where the children can draw using MS Paint. I should get L to have a go on here (no graphics tablet, sadly) because he thinks that all the PCs at home do is play Numberjacks and In the Night Garden games.
When we were on the ferry recently, there was a rather nifty touch screen console with a couple of drawing programmes (one was drawing and one was colouring, I think). He loved those.
Yes, Tabs was the same: Teletubbies games galore. Still, once we’d let her on there to do that, I suppose letting her loose on Photoshop was just another small step in the loss of our computer to her…
LOOK WHAT i FOUND :D
http://www.jacksonpollock.org/
Go to that website, and it’s basically just drawing like Pollock: you left click mouse to change the colour and away you go! The faster you move the mouse, the thinner the line. Well, just like Pollock I suppose, dripping paint of his brush/hands.
It just reminded me of this post. Wahey!
That’s so COOOOL! Must show it to Tabitha.