The drawing ideas for kids in this post are not of the step by step drawing for kids activities you will find in other posts. They are a few fun, easy drawing projects that you can give for kids before you start in with the exact drawing lessons. In my post drawing for children you will find a basic understanding of what drawing for children is all about. Here are just some ideas to get the children drawing creatively without having to worry about following any kinds of patterns.
The first activity is called finish the picture.
Above is an image (that is partly cut off) of some of the beginning marks I would make on a paper to give to the children. When you give children an empty piece of paper and tell them to draw, many of them have no problem with that. There are other children however, that are so used to be told exactly what to draw or fill in in their coloring pages that they get frozen.
This activity allows the children a basis to start the drawing process and they can create anything they want from these initial lines. You can either produce one of these and then just run it off on a copy machine, or you can do them by hand individually.
These are just demo ideas and you can of course, create your own markings to start them off. You can also decide on the types of writing implements you want to give the children. Markers, crayons, pastels, pencils are all great and you may want to switch off to get the children used to the different media.
Drawing project #2: Abstract masterpieces
The next activity is one I got straight out of Drawing with Children .
This is a fun, abstract activity that uses the nice, colorful markers that are used throughout the Monart method. I’ve always believed that it’s really helpful for kids to get into many different non realistic artists to show them what real art can be.
Many children in our society today still only believe that you can be a real artist if you draw something realistic. The more you show them artists work like Jackson Pollack, Matisse, Picasso and others, the more they will start to realize how broad art is.
The way to start off this activity is by collecting all kinds of materials to serve as templates. Below are some that I gathered. You will notice that I also have some shapes that I had that had been cut out of tagboard. You can use store bought templates, you can use stuff from around the house or you can use both.
After the children started I ended up removing the larger baking pans shown above as the papers I gave them were not large enough to absorb that design.
Tell the children to use the objects to create designs all over their pictures. They can overlap them as well.
Then have them to color them in. Let them use the rich colored markers as their designs will be much more vivid.
Below are some of the gorgeous drawings the children made.
One mistake I felt I made was I gave them an object that ended up looking too realistic. They are so fixated on realism that some of them were concentrating too much on this template as a realistic object. The object below is a strange looking scissors that I have however…. 
the kids used it as a template they realized it looked like a bird and added it into their design. I really wanted only abstract pieces but, it was to late to remove it once I noticed what they were doing.
All in all thought they really enjoyed this activity and at the end one of the children even expressed an interest in doing another one as she realized that she could really use her mind to create a better design.
Drawing activity #3: Scribble scrabble shapes
This is really a much simpler version of the activity above and is probably good for younger children as well. You can also extend this activity to become a pasting activity after the cutting.
The children were told to make pictures with a pen or pencil that were as they call it “scribble scrabble”.
They were then instructed to look for different shapes in their scribble scrabble’s and to outline as many shapes as they could find within their pictures with a marker.
It is a very interesting experience for the children and a new way of seeing shape.
After they did this they colored in their shapes using any of the markers or pastels you have. They end up making interesting pictures from their shapes. If you want to continue this activity then you can have the children cut out their shapes and collage them onto a separate piece of paper.
Related posts:
- There is a step by drawing for kids method that is easy and simple for children to follow
- Coloring pages for boys will be too boring for them: Give them other exciting drawing activites instead
- Easy craft projects: Crafts that are easy for the kids and easy for the adult
- Painting for kids: Give children painting activites that allow their creativity to blossom and develop
- Learn what creativity for kids is PLUS how you can Increase creativity with children with 9 creativity exercises
