Abi the Artist

Abi's made an incredible leap in her drawing and colouring skills in the last 2 weeks.  She went from scribbling over a picture she was 'colouring' to actually paying attention to the lines. (All by herself. I've never made attempts to correct or change her drawing and colouring.) Although she still goes over the lines with her broad strokes of colour, she is clearly cognizant of the forms and adds different colours to different parts of the picture.  In her drawing she's recently been working a lot of spiral forms, adding legs and faces and calling them dinosaurs or dragons. Sometimes she adds wings (for a dragon). Or spirals as rose flowers. Or just single lines in wandering shapes that she will look at after and decide what it resembles.
Last week she presented me with a picture she'd drawn of me. It had a head and face. It also had arms and legs where they should be (not protruding from my head), but no torso.  I asked where my torso and neck were. I then had to add that a torso is a body.  I think she added them in. (I can't find that picture.) A couple days later she brought me a new picture and there were all the major body parts - much to my surprise since we hadn't talked about it since.  This evening she drew an even better picture of me, hanging on the wall. (At the end of the video. And yes, she added breasts.) A few pictures later I pulled out the camera and asked if she'd draw a picture for Nana and Pa-pere. The video follows:

Argh - is youtube down or something? None of my videos are working.

Here are the pictures:

Nana and Pa-Pere (first time I've seen her draw short hair) with baby Mandy, Dorion, and Abi below. Deliberately made smaller and proportional in size. She insists she is bigger than Dorion - who is bigger than me as a baby.

Me/Mommy. With flowers adorning my hair (a later addition while it was on the wall and stickers were out.)

One of many spiral animals.

I'm no artist. Nor is Robin. At least not with drawing skills. I'll have to seek out someone more talented to guide her skills later. For now she keeps surprising me, especially this last week or so.  She's also started showing an interest in writing letters, but since she is left-handed I've been doing some research to help her in this regard. Robin writes with a 'hooked' hand, but I've been learning about the technique of turning the page and working with a straight wrist from below so that the things written (or drawn) can still be seen. Plus, less smudging.  In the video Abi is holding a fat marker, but normally she holds a pen or pencil better - and has since she was about a year old and started drawing.  She's never liked the art utensils designed for young children - the fat tools. They never made sense to her because she couldn't hold them normally.  I'd picked up those fat little markers as her first lil markers a year ago, but she has some finer ones that are easier for her to hold and I'll make sure to only buy thinner markers from now on because she can hold them better.

Also, I picked up a small package of plasticine modelling clay a couple of days ago, made a little dog figure and had to go out that evening. So I suggested (as a distraction) that she make me an army of dogs. She did. She quite likes plasticine.  I'll have to get more - for a larger army.