Tips #3 Art for Art's Sake

If you are a great artist, confident that you can whip up a masterpiece to rival Rembrandt in a few seconds with four colours of chalk, then you should ignore this. There's nothing here to interest you.

On the other hand if, like me, you are a fairly useless artists whose rabbits are indistinguishable from a bunch of bananas then I have a few suggestions.

You can nowadays, of course, find and print stuff from the internet. There are plenty of royalty free clip art sites around. It's a good solution but it fails to address two issues. First, you might, again like me, find yourself with a computer but no printer. That means drawing your own pictures to put on the board.

Second, and even worse, there might come a time when you need to draw something on the board, a time when your efforts to explain what something is using words have failed. A classroom of blank faces will be facing you and you know that if you could just draw, for example, a picture of a caravan they would all understand immediately.

I have two, well three really but two go together, pieces of advice.

Here is number 1. Think about what things you might need to draw in the lesson. Anticipating the need is half the battle. And here is number 1A. Practice. If you think you might need to draw a rhino on the board then search the internet for pictures of rhino, choose the simplest and draw it a couple of times on a piece of paper. Take the paper to class with you so that you can remember how it goes.

And here is, the far more important, number 2.

You don't need to be Rembrandt. You don't need to have detailed, anatomically-accurate representations of people. Stick figures will do just fine. 

You want a house? Draw the kind of house a kid draws - a box with smaller boxes for windows and door. A triangle for a roof, another box for a chimney and, for that added artistic flourish a bit of scribble for smoke.

You want a sheep? scribble down a roughly circular cloud, add a head, ears and four straight lines for legs. Presto! A sheep.

It doesn't need to be good it needs to be recognisable.

In fact the more rubbish you are at drawing, the more the kids will like it. Just put down something that is guessable. If a couple of kids seem to know what it is get them to stand up and tell the class in Chinese.

And that's it, all you need to know about art in class.

Oh yes, one more thing. If, as you will in some lessons, you have kids come to the board to draw anything, don't be embarrassed at your own poor efforts when one of them, in five seconds flat, sketches a detailed and scarily lifelike, life-size alligator.

Just compliment him graciously and don't ask him next time.