Art manifesto for children

IN my last column, I talked about my frustration with art education in Malaysia. It is a subject that requires the serious participation of various parties.

Here, I’d like to present what I feel should be done to make art an interesting and fulfilling subject.

Parents
1. Start them out on empty.
Pages, that is. Stop buying colouring books for kids to colour in; give them blank pages to work on instead. Hand them pencils, crayons or paints, and encourage them to explore colour and lines.

2. Colouring within the lines is not a big deal.
Don’t make colouring within the lines a milestone to be reached and celebrated, rather, let it be one of the processes of discovering art.

So instead of breaking out the Ribena and chips, give your child a pat on the back for discovering the knack of keeping a colour to one side of the line, and start talking to him about the relationship between colour and placement. Would the teddy bear look weird if his paw is blue but his limbs yellow? Perhaps it comes from a different world. Who says teddy bears have to be only shades of brown?
 

Art is not just 2D. Kids have to be exposed to all aspects of art.