Children’s paintings take flight with imagination and take lines for a walk.

Hu Yuxin: Professor at Shanghai Theater Academy and the founder of modern children’s experimental painting.

He understands line drawing this way: one theory, two levels of meaning, three studies, four major sections, and five key points.

Five of the key points are very practical for me as a front-line teacher, including:

1. Draw a long line: draw from one side of the paper to the other side;

　2. Draw big figures: Grasp the overall situation, look at the big picture, and fill up a piece of paper;

3. Add small figures to the big figures: local in-depth and rich details;

4. Lines go hand in hand to let children see the connection between things;

5. Add lines after graphics

Line drawing uses the simplest drawing tools to draw with lines. Lines are the most childish painting vocabulary. All children’s first paintings start with lines. Lines are the most advanced modeling vocabulary. German artist Paul Klee has a famous saying, “Go for a walk with a line.” The essence of line lies in its emotional meaning. Line drawing for young children uses lines, the simplest and most direct painting method for expressing images. Through a large number of rich lines, children draw their own paintings based on their own observations, feelings and combinations. Line drawing It has the characteristics of casualness, freedom and exaggeration. It is the beginning of children's learning of painting and the foundation of painting.

Understand lines - discovered in the appreciation of works

Understand various lines through appreciation of works. Of course, in the process of our children understanding lines, they must follow a step-by-step process from simple to complex. The principle is to start from common straight lines and arcs and slowly transition to understanding city wall lines, broken lines, etc., and gradually gain a deeper understanding.

Rodin said: Beauty is everywhere. For our eyes, it is not a lack of beauty, but a lack of discovery. Therefore, we can also go into life, discover and feel lines in life, such as daily decorations... to understand all kinds of lines, from which we naturally realize that "lines" are actually everywhere, as long as we pay attention to look for them can be discovered.

Drawing lines - taking a walk with a line

Drawing lines is actually an easy task. As far as a line is concerned, there is no right or wrong, good or bad, but The purpose of line drawing is to draw the relationship between density, thickness, black and white, etc. of lines.

To draw a line, you must first start by drawing a single line. Draw lines like water - wavy lines; taste spicy food - broken lines; touch objects with different textures like the Great Wall - City wall lines... combine drawing single lines with various sensory stimulations to draw lines with emotional color.

Then draw lines with representational meaning, such as first drawing a curve on the paper, then drawing the same curve immediately below it, and then drawing another one, so that one by one is added. We were surprised to find out from the dense relationship between multiple lines that this was the sea. We clearly realized that drawing more lines would look better, like another kind of thing; we also felt that the lines bit by bit were like rain, The rotating lines are like snails, the horizontal and vertical lines are like stars, the up and down lines are like mountains, etc. The purpose of this stage in the early middle school is to let children come out of scribbling and know that they can draw many of themselves with lines. When you see things, you can use lines to express what you want to express.

Combining lines - holding hands with a variety of lines

After accumulating various lines, we combine the lines to draw various shapes. Such as the combination of arcs and straight lines, the combination of straight lines and city wall lines, the combination of arcs and broken lines...the combination and change of lines are so random and beautiful, and the various surfaces formed after the combination are so diverse and magical. Through the success of combined lines, we can find that decorative line drawing is actually very beautiful.

In the process of decoration, we need to combine decoration from the whole to the part. The decoration process should be dense and varied, and lines and graphics should be interlaced to avoid repetition of single lines. From simple lines To complex combinations, from lines to surfaces, from transformation arrangements to transformation combinations, no special skills are required.

There are no two identical village leaves in the world. In the changes and combinations of points, lines, and surfaces, no one’s line drawings are the same.

Throughout our traditional painting teaching, crayon painting dominates the world, and small classes are mainly based on coloring. Monotonous coloring exercises make children lose interest in painting. In our daily teaching, we actually It can also be infiltrated into related printing and paper-tearing activities... to make our art activities rich and colorful. As Professor Hu Yuxin said, the goal of children's art education is to allow children to perceive beauty, maintain their dreams, enjoy the process, and make life more beautiful. To quote the words of Mr. Long Niannan, an art teacher at the China Children's Center, it is necessary to give children half-finished teaching, so that children can easily succeed.