Nurturing Creativity in Our Drawing Class

This thought came into my mind when my sister told me to buy a box of color pencil for my nephew. Suddenly, I remembered about my childhood and playing with colors. I was never good at drawing and still I am not. But that is not my concern now. My concern is the “WHY” of drawing class? The purpose? I think the purpose of drawing class is to nurture creativity among the students. But is the drawing class fulfilling that purpose?

No,my experience says most of the classes are not nurturing creativity rather destroying it. Human brain is divided into two parts- logical and creative. In drawing we need to use both sides of our brain. When we draw and color forms and figures the logical side is used and when we match and mix colors our creative side is used[1]. But, now, we are making the whole drawing class depending on the logical side and there is less opportunity to use the creative side rather there is strong negative incentive of being creative sometimes.

In drawing class, teacher gives the task of drawing the sky and the sky needs to be blue. If the student uses otherwise he might be punished with less marks. But why sky can’t be red or black? Why orange needs to be orange color only? Why apple needs to be red always? Why the leaves need to be green? The teacher has brought the drawing class under rules and regulations and in every stroke of the color pencil student has to remember the rules. Where is the room for exercising creativity?

One of the key ingredients of creativity is experimentation. One needs to experiment with his craft to develop the creative-self. I think most of the teachers want their students to be the next Pablo Picasso. But they don’t think about the long practicing period of Picasso, the hours of experimentation with color, forms, rather focus on the masterpieces of Picasso. They want their students to produce masterpieces in every class. 

Picasso didn’t become the Picasso in one year drawing class. If teachers really want their students to be the next Picasso I think they should give the students the thinking style of Picasso. Sow the seeds of experimentation in them and in coming days they will become the Picasso in their own fields.

So, I think we need to redesign our drawing classes. Our drawing class should be more fun and relaxing in place of just an addition to the boring academic classes. We need to create more space for free thinking instead of bombarding the students with rules. We should bring the students out of the class room and take them to nature and let them draw whatever they want. They can use any color they want to and choose any object to portrait. Exam question will not be to draw an object from the following list: ball, pen, house, bird, and tree, rather question will be to draw any object you like. In this way, I believe, the drawing classes will be more able to serve the purpose of nurturing creativity among the students.  

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[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/coloring-for-stress_n_5975832.html