Sketchbook Tales: The Natural Evolution of Art and The Artist

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Illustration Friday Theme: Tales & Legends
Artist: Debra Woolard Bender
Title: Sketchbook Tales: The Natural Evolution of Art and The Artist
Medium: Digital, redrawn from a child's drawing
Materials: Paint Shop Pro 9; Font: Ravie; painted using mouse
Category: Children's Art

the monster in my closet
what does it wear in winter
I wonder?

DW Bender, 2002
Haiku published in "Haibun by Contemporary Writers"

Web-browsing tremendously inspiring artworks produced by young children, I happened upon the intriguing site of artist/illustrator, Dave Devries: "The Monster Engine". Dave asked the question, "What would a child's artwork look like if painted realistically?" A cartoonist, he tried fleshing out monsters drawn by his young neice. Now, he does demonstrations for elementary school age children from their drawings to help them learn more about art, and sometimes to help them deal with their fears. Check out his Gallery. He even has a short online movie on what he does and why.

As a mother, grandmother and general admirer of children's artwork (and having once led a school art class for 4th graders), I was fascinated, and had to try a redraw version myself from a child's skeletal sketch. And although a child's artwork surely needs no redrawing, it is a fun challenge. Consequently, because this image is the product of what I'd been working on all afternoon, it has become my entry for this week's Illustration Friday theme: "Tales and Legends" - well, this may be farfetched, but it's not actually a well known legend, even among artists, that every piece of art becomes real, taking on a life of its own. Especially when the sketch is put away in the closet, and lights are turned off for the night. Of course, children naturally and rightly sense such things, before they become too worldly and stop believing in monsters and tooth faeries and fish tales. The five-legged, two-tailed kittycatosaurus in my Illustration Friday submission is such a tale...and so is the mythical book made only of imagination, 0's and 1's.