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Confess. How Many Of You Colored Outside The Lines As A Child?


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The teacher who made me draw in the lines was my regular teacher, I didn't have a art teacher until I was 12.  She brought out the artist in me as all of my other art teachers did.  I appreciate all of the encouragement that they gave me and would like to thank all of the art teachers out there.  I volunteered to teach art in my son's classes until he was in junior high.  He went to a private school and the only art they thought was important was theater.  I even had one teacher refuse to let me teach some art because they were learning math that year.  Denice

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I had to go to the pricipals office in kindergarden for making jokes as my classmates where laughing to much for nap time.

I do not recall the lines -my guess we had no lines-I Know that would have not kept me inside them if we had them.

I HAVE NEVER been a conformist.

I'm sure the dog ate my colored drawing homework.

Mark

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My parents got me a sketchbook and some drawing pencils very young because art runs in my family.  I often got in trouble for drawing nudes and large breasts on the clothed figures. Kids would tattle on me for drawing naked people and I would try to explain that that is just what artists are supposed to do. 

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I had very supportive teachers. In 4th grade I was allowed to draw at an easel in the back of the room. I drew lots of birds for a while. Miss Horowitz decorated the classroom with them. They were all imagined birds. 

My HS teacher from 1966, he was also very supportive and guided me through a portfolio that help me get a city Board of Ed. four year scholarship. . I saw him a few years ago 2013. I told him about La Meridiana and he went to La meridiana for a short residency. He mostly saints now but he was a ceramics student in college.

 

Marcia

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I didn't have coloring books. I did seriously drool every day to school, over a oil pastel set in the window of a house paint store. Beg , borrowed and hunted for pennies to buy the set($2.99). I didn't know about tax or paper, my father, notorious skin flint , paid the tax, and bought the paper. I was 7.

Alas my sister was deemed the artist of the family, no room for two, so none indulged or supported me again.i almost believed them except is the only thing besides my family that makes my heart beat.

I once was told to fill in a pumpkin form that was 3 feet across w an orange crayon. Nyc school system in the late sixties. I knew then it was make work to keep us busy, got quite nasty if we stopped scribbling. Mine looked horrible . Not only was it terribly uneven, and spotty, but I also got bored and would miss the lines. This was a perfect analogy of my creative life for a long time: insufficient instruction and supplies, lack of direction , lack of input. I couldn't see how anyone got from x to y etc. I never did have an art class.

The crayons drove me nuts, especially the box of 64. Those colors, those luscious , perfect, beautiful colors! I had a box. Once, I think I was 11 or 12. The colors just wouldn't go down on paper the way they looked in the box. So,I made them into shavings and tried to melt them. What a mess! But they were closer to true color that way, just not easy to manipulate.

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"My fourth grade nun squashed any artistic ability I may have had." - 123pop

 

The church has a lot to answer for!!! My husband (left handed) was 'forced' to use his right hand at his Catholic primary school! He now writes right handed, draws/paints left handed, was a right handed cricket batsman, but left handed bowler, ambidextrous squash player - very confusing if you're the opponent! And now a right handed golfer who wonders if he should have started playing left handed! (every golfer needs an excuse!)

 

You could say it's done him a favour, but it's pretty devastating for a 5 year old!

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I was also a lefty and forced to write righty in first grade. I failed all the penmanship tests they gave and they were stumped by it and wrote letters to my parents and discussed this problem at conferences with my parents but they still insisted I was going to be right handed grade after grade. I now have terrible handwriting skills no matter which hand I use, however, I have become ambidextrous in many other ways, so I guess it was worth forcing my brain to do the opposite of what was natural for me. I throw pottery "righty" with the wheel turning counter-clockwise but I am just as comfortable doing it the other way around.

 

Paul

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  • 4 weeks later...

The teacher who made me draw in the lines was my regular teacher, I didn't have a art teacher until I was 12.  She brought out the artist in me as all of my other art teachers did.  I appreciate all of the encouragement that they gave me and would like to thank all of the art teachers out there.  I volunteered to teach art in my son's classes until he was in junior high.  He went to a private school and the only art they thought was important was theater.  I even had one teacher refuse to let me teach some art because they were learning math that year.  Denice

You could have done perspective!

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needed glasses but did not get them until i was 13.  saw lots of billboards advertising lots of things all the time. in third grade we were told to make a poster.  i made my letters and put them in an arch but could not figure out why they did not look right.  (perspective missing) i was  told that it was a simple exercise and there was no need to make it so complicated.  everyone else did straight lines, why did i always have to be different!  

 

fifth grade....always colored within the lines but never noticed that there were instructions on what colors to use within those lines.  after doing a blond girl in a pink blouse i noticed that everyone else in class had done black hair and a blue blouse.  why can't i follow directions???  in trouble again, what's new.

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For me I was and probably always will be a geometric person.  Going back to trying to fill in the lines my worry was it looked streaked and you could see my crayon strokes, or that when you could see them they were not all going in exactly the same direction.

 

Even today I like the more geometric and proportionate balanced approach.  I'll make cubic mugs rather than cylinders,  The base needs to be 2/3 the height, or vise versa.  Very often what frustrates me as flaws in a straight line or flat side others say give it more of an artistic look.

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Originally I was left handed but that was trained out of me by family and my school system to make it (I suppose) easier to  "fit in". Though at this point in my life I am hardly ambidexterous in some untrained skills I still favor my left hand. At this point I wish I could regain all of my left hand skills. In time I feel this will happen since I see an empty glass as one that CAN be filled. :rolleyes:

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how about the sloppy cobalt drips of glaze that fall off a high part and are thought of as ART?  they MUST be art because they are on the cover of magazines.

 

This I think falls into the area of beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  As I said I do like hard geometric shapes.  But I'm intrigued with  the the blending together of colors especially  glazes  .  For me it is a mater of controlling this blending though.  While I only use commercial glazes which I brush on I find the blending of colors extremely integrating in pieces and can give them an added dimension and interest.   One thing I'm experimenting with is the layering of colored glazes with a layer of clear between them, over a base from under-glazes.   While the end results is not always what I expected I'm getting closer to being able to predict what the end results may look like.  

 

I'm seeing the ability foir get the geometric patterns of color with using the under-glazes that stay where you put them but the translucent colored glazes over them creating softening of the colors, more dimension and even a marbling  touch..   

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 years later...

soooo, I clearly remember having a sheet of six elephants on a page and coloring them very fast.....and outside the lines.  Teacher handed it back and told me to color inside the lines.  I very carefully drew new lines around the elephants and colored to those lines.  

There was a parent-teacher conference involved.  My dad asked why the teacher was trying to suppress my natural creativity and had she see the painters of most of the 20th century??  I don't have a ton of memories of my dad as a kid, but they generally involve him defending my ability to grow and imagine and learn.  

That one incident turned out to be precognitive.....I am a rule breaker, color outside the lines, make new rules, and defy those that think their arbitrary rules are the end-a;; and be-all.   The one caveat is that one should know what the rules are so that one can break them CORRECTLY.  :D

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  • 2 months later...

Long ago my mom was working on a grant project and I was offered the job of designing a coloring book. the grant was to promote local business, tourism, etc for a county of NE California. I did some great drawings of animals, but backed out of the project when they insisted I draw a logging truck. 

I was very messy when it came to coloring books and eventually got sick of the critiques from family members. However as a teen I did have a black velvet unicorn poster that I did with neon felt tips. Good times. 

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I swung both ways. I practiced, enjoyed, and "honored" the precision and fine hand/fine eye needed to stay within the lines. I learned be disciplined, to exert control, and to be able reproduce something with exactness when desired. It is still a valued skill. Unfortunately, it took many years before I learned not to outline everything in black! 

I also just let fly with my own inclinations, decisions, and "philosophy".  Often got on the bad side of teachers for frustrating their efforts to teach, apparently the only way they knew how.   Eventually I was (thankfully) exposed to teachers/instructors with more going on upstairs than a need to assure that everyone followed the rules. People who bothered to explain "why", and could make a case for the importance of understanding that. As Ceallach noted, know the rules before rejecting/expanding on the best practices/correct techniques etc. 

Now, when I incorporate flaws into my work, it is an intentional stance. That runs the risk of garnering assumptions (i.e. lack of skill or technical knowledge) but to me it is worth it  for people to be challenged about what they think "perfection" is, or what standards are all about. When are certain criteria essential? When are they irrelevant or counter-productive? Where is the line? Is there a line? We judge works of art as good or bad all the time...with zillions of dollars attached to how we "value" it.  How to juxtapose the Basquait with the Da Vinci? Does context matter? (Personally, I'll take Leonardo's within-the-lines  over Jean-Michael's no-lines any day, but I digress....LOL).  

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  • 5 months later...

Still painstakingly coloring and glazing inside the lines - but they're lines that l have drawn myself, usually. 

I always envied my friends who could approach glazing in that happy-go-lucky slapdash way and have brilliant, stunning results. However, they could not usually tell me how they did it, nor could they duplicate them, although that just seemed to make all those successes more precious. On the other hand, they often had difficulties when they were trying to get a particular result. 

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