Class Description
Forget Everything You Know & Draw Like a Child!
Teacher: Lewis Rossignol
6 Lessons • $72
Class Dates: March 25 – April 4, 2025
There’s something really cool about children’s art. It comes from such an intuitive place. For a child art is about having fun. The process takes precedence over the final product, whereas for adults it’s usually all about the final result.
The desire to succeed in creating something good often will cause us to overthink things and tighten up. Because of this I’ve been working hard to get back to that place I was at as a child where I was creating intuitively, focusing on the process, and just having fun. As a result my art has become even looser, my creativity has increased, and most importantly my days have become more fun!
This class should help you get back to creating art with child-like intuition, curiosity, and playful creativity. The lessons are based on different aspects of children’s art that make it so interesting to look at.
Lewis
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A selection of Lewis’ loose, child-inspired art!
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Class Itinerary
Lessons are prerecorded and are available at 1amPT on the following schedule:
Lesson 1 – Tuesday, March 25
Lesson 2 – Wednesday, March 26
Lesson 3 – Friday, March 28
Lesson 4 – Tuesday, April 1
Lesson 5 – Wednesday, April 2
Lesson 6 – Friday, April 4
Lesson 1: Get a Grip!
For this lesson I’ll start by showing you some of the tools that I like to use. Although, for these lessons I really believe that you should work with whatever tools you already have. I’ll also demonstrate some different grips that will help you loosen up your mark making by giving you less control of your tools. The assignment will have you trying out these grips to see which ones work best for you personally.
Lesson 2: Process Over Everything in the Whole Wide World
This lesson may be the hardest one for some of you because it’s all about divorcing yourself from the final product. What the art looks like here isn’t nearly as important as the process. I’ll show you how I get into this headspace, and some ideas to create a drawing where process trumps product.
Lesson 3: Draw What You Know (Not What You See)
Children almost never use references. They don’t need to because they have vivid imaginations. Plus they don’t need to look at a photo of a butterfly because they’ve already seen one so they get the gist of it. For this lesson I’ll demonstrate how we can draw what we know instead of what we see. The assignment will ask you to draw a picture completely from your mind.
Lesson 4: Popcorn Hierarchy
There’s quite a few different ways you can create hierarchy within your art, including color, contrast and size. However, for the most part children rely almost exclusively on size. And they do so in a non-realistic way. Have you ever seen a children’s drawing of their family where the mother is twice as big as everyone else? Does the child view the mother as a monster? No. It’s just that the mother is the most important figure in their life so they’re the biggest. For this lesson we’re going to draw a scene where what’s important to us is extremely obvious to the viewer because of the exaggerated size differences. Realistic dimensions are out the window for this one.
Lesson 5: Pickles & Problem Solving
My favorite part of children’s art is the lack of planning. They figure things out as they go, and you can sometimes see that in the finished piece. Because they’re working fast without much thinking they have to stay in a creative mindset where they’re ready to solve problems as they arise. The lesson here is about how we can solve problems that arise in our art. We may even create problems on purpose.
Lesson 6: Floating Elements for Fun & Profit
For this final lesson we’re going to think about the lack of grounding that takes place in a lot of children’s art. There may not be a horizon line, and things may seem to be floating, but we usually can still tell what’s going on. We’re going to have fun here with some floating elements, as well as trying to combine the other aspects we’ve talked about through the first five lessons without getting bogged down in overthinking.
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For a full list of the supplies you will need, see the tab titled “Supplies” located just under the video screen above.