Adults when asked to draw say ‘I can’t draw’ or ‘I am not good at drawing’. Pablo Picasso said that -all children are born artists; the problem is to remain an artist when they grow up. Many of us have not understood the purpose of drawing as a subject or reflected upon the benefits of learning this skill. Drawing is the most primitive skill used by our ancestors since the time of cave painting, whether to tell their stories, express themselves, or to communicate with others. Our brain has a great connection with drawings. As psychologist drawings are used as a medium of understanding personality. It is believed that we project our underlying motives, needs, conflicts, interpersonal relationships, and our inner world through drawings. In schools drawing is merely considered an activity. Students do not consider their drawing class as an important subject for their holistic development.
Drawing ameliorates the cognitive, emotional, and motor development of a child. At the preprimary level and early years of schooling, drawing can be used as a great medium to refine fine motor skills. A child can learn how to use eye-hand coordination with the help of drawings. Improved eye-hand coordination helps a child to copy down notes from the board.
Our internal senses, the ones which are not visible but definitely play an important role in our body are the vestibular and proprioception senses. When we are drawing we use the vestibular senses by not only making use of our hands, limbs and body to maintain the right posture but we also use the proprioception to send messages to the brain to coordinate movement through our joints and muscles while drawing.
The visual perception which is an ability to organize and interpret the information that is seen and give it meaning is also boosted with the help of drawing. Occupational therapists use a lot of drawing activities to help children with sensory integration dysfunction also known as Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD).
The other paybacks of drawing are that it improves concentration as it enhances one’s ability to sit for hours focused on one task. A complete drawing gives a sense of accomplishment a feel-good feeling.
We know that drawing fosters creativity and boosts imagination. But when a child is provided with a blank sheet of paper and asked to draw, the child has to plan how to draw. Drawing thus includes planning and organization. Adding colors to the drawing involves a lot of judgment
Spatial Reasoning is improved with the help of drawing. It is the capacity to think about objects in three dimensions and to draw conclusions about those objects from limited information. To add further closure ability which the ability to fill in the gaps or missing parts of a whole
The benefits of drawing are endless for students aspiring to get into fields like engineering especially civil engineering mechanical, architecture, animation, fine arts, interior designing, civil draftsman fashion designing, apparel and textile, designing, commercial art, should consider making drawing an integral part of their life.