Art question.....portraits?

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My six year old is an excellent artist. She can draw plants and animals with amazing detail, plasticity, and verisimilitude. She can not, however, draw people.

There are times when she curls up next to me and weeps, "Mommy, how come I can't draw people?"

The art teacher at her school is now starting a unit on portraiture. She wants the kids to draw pictures of themselves, their families, and their friends.

Does anyone know anything on a block when it comes to drawing pictures of people?

Does anyone have any suggestions for how I can help my girl learn to draw people?

Any advice, information, or recommendations will be warmly welcomed!

I'm an adult and am a hobby artist and to this day I DO NOT draw people. It's kinda like a religious thing to me. I draw myself as a meerkat/lion hybrid (officaly she's a meerkat, but everyone insists she looks too felineish). As a kid, I would just draw a stick figure but that was never good enough for my teachers and phycologists who would often push me into a meltdown. I don't draw people. Period. It's like asking a Muslim woman to take off her headcovering or asking a Rasta to cut off their dreadlocks. I'm an adult and now no one can tell me what I can and can't draw. I've never wanted to take art classes or major in art because I would have to draw what the teacher wanted me to draw.

There is a book in the "For Dummies" series called "Drawing for Dummies". I have it. It has plenty of specific information about drawing people, with steps to follow. You might want to see if they have it in your local library, or if they can request it from another one. If they don't, I'm sure a big book store would either have or be able to order it for you.

If not, drop me a PM and I can mail you my copy. I don't use it.

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I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
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As MagicMerkaat's post points out, art can be funny this way, able to draw A but not B.

Has she tried copying various styles of cartoon art or drawing a favorite doll? Experiment with that and see if it helps.

Faces are extremely difficult to draw. She might be frustrated because it is challenging and may not look the way she wants it to. I stink at art...so no advice there!

My daughter, who is 9, is very much the same way; loves drawing animals, fantasy creatures, plants, cartoons, etc. but stops short of drawing people. Only recently did she draw cartoon people. Now she says she's only interested in "anything but people", but when she was younger, she used to tell me that people were hard to draw - too many variations according to the person's facials expression, stature, and so on. I think while animals were fairly straight-forward (cats are about the same size, mice are about the same size) there was so much difference in people, she couldn't classify them into a "category". Hence, the amount of brainwork that went into drawing a person was a lot more than drawing an animal.

The fact that my DD (who was diagnosed PDD-NOS, but is now clearly Asperger's), didn't like different faces (emotions were a big issue for her) also played a major role in when and how she learned to draw. She just hasn't had as much experience drawing people. Because of this, she isn't an "expert" at it, and she likes being an expert at things!

When DD had to draw a self-portrait in school, she forced herself to look at it as an exercise in parts. The kids were given a mirror and told to draw their faces about the size of an 8.5" x11" page (as an aside, she also doesn't like being told what to do for art, which is why she never joined an after school art class). She kind of tackled the assignment in "quadrants" - looking at her face as specific lines, not necessarily as "a cheek", "lips", "nose". I think by distancing herself from what she thought a (her) face should look like, she was able to do the assignment.

But it was hard for my DD too...she's now being homeschooled and interestingly, has started drawing people...they are somewhat derivative (compared to her animal art), but they are still pretty cool!

First lightly sketch the body or face using only basic lines and geometric shapes then draw the details over them, don't start with details (sometimes cartoon faces are an exception).

Just a question. Do you know if she can actually see faces? Many autistic people can't really. I'm not sure if this is quite the definition of faceblind, but if she only sees parts of faces, or can't look at eyes, then drawing portraits is going to be very difficult. Perhaps this an area for an accommodation? Can she express what the difficulty is?

If she can't draw an actual portrait of a person perhaps she could do something symbolic or abstract. If she knew me for example, she could draw a picture of cats among other things.

As I said in my previous post, not drawing people is kinda like a religious thing to me. As I said, I'm an adult now and no one can really force me to draw anything I don't want too. People seem to be understanding and accepting but one might aruge that since I can draw animals with facial expressions, I could draw people if I "wanted too" and am just being stubborn. The answer is I DON'T want too and it dosen't really bother me to be called stubborn. It never has; probably because it's true. If I don't want to do something, espicaly something that goes against my personal beliefs, there is nothing one can do to make me do it.

Speaking of being stubborn, one of those people might see this http://phoenix-kat.deviantart.com/galle ... 4#/d4epto6 and automaticaly assume I could do that same expression on a person. I've never actualy tried to draw a person in years but I don't plan to try either. People always tell me that is very limiting, usualy by people who only draw people. There are litteraly thousands of animals to choose from, whereas people are just one species so telling me not drawing people is kinda "limiting", I find that very hypocritcal.

I've also been yelled at by my teachers for coloring things the wrong color. "Following directions" was never one of my strong points, espicaly if I didn't see any logic in the direction and when I asked for the logic behind it I was usualy told, "Because I said so". That never worked with me but a lot of school teachers seem to have a God complex...or at least many of mine did. "Following directions", or at least the way it was enforced with me seemed more like an attempt to turn me into a mindless, order taking drone. Even when it was never specfified what color something was supposed to me, I got yelled at because it wasn't realistic or some other stupid reason that made no sence to me.

Meerkat, what you say is very interesting. She does draw animal representations of herself and people close to her. Her reaction to being asked to draw people is, "I don't draw them."

Normally, if a teacher were asking her to do something she didn't want to do, I would have a talk with the teacher. This is different, because the people thing bothers her. There are times when SHE wants to draw people and becomes very depressed that she can't.

Sylvia, she can see faces. I know because she will comment when I wear make-up.

Thanks to everyone for the great suggestions. I even had her read this post and the replies to see if she thought any of them would work.

I think we will try to start with cartoon faces and work our way from there.

I really do value the advice I get here.

I'm an amateur artist and I tend to steer away from portraits. But, I've been trying to place people in my landcapes and to practise the odd close-up face portrait. I work best from photos. I print out a black/white version first of all, to get the lines and shadows right, then I work on the colour. How about asking her to try tracing from a black and white photo.

My daughter's 6yrs old too. She's very keen on art as well and recently won a prize at school, for a book cover design. She wants to be an illustrator (for now anyway).

Good luck.