Monsters! Everywhere!
Sharing my love of drawing monsters with my kids
I love drawing things. Mainly monsters.
I seem to be drawing almost every day now that I have kids, so it’s strange to think it’s only quite recently that I’ve started drawing and sketching again. I seem to remember I used to draw a lot more about ten years ago, but somehow I dropped out of the habit.
This month I gave myself a little project — to make a “Monster Menagerie” for the wall. I drew two or three monsters per day and it turned into this:
While I was doing it I noticed that the kids would be quite mesmerised by the shapes I was making, and would try to copy them. Some of them they traced on sheets of paper.
Around that time, Instagram released a new video app called Hyperlapse that lets you make sped-up videos. I made my first one of those 42 monsters, and here it is:
It’s quite hard to copy a drawing when you’ve only seen the finished thing. And I’ve noticed that the kids preferred to watch me while I am drawing something, so that they could understand the process of drawing, not just copy the end result.
My particular style has a strong, simple outline around each of the monsters, and I try not to have “draw the head, draw the body” as the process, so that you end up with a continuous outline rather than a series of shapes.
That “draw a circle, then draw another one” style is often the way you teach kids to draw something, but just like the classic “how to draw an owl” you can end up with a child saying “I don’t know how to draw that” because it’s hard to understand the steps involved from the simplified to the complex:
I noticed the other day that because the kids have been copying my process of drawing, they’re starting to be able to draw these continuous outlines now too. Check out the feet on my 5-year-old son’s Clock Monster:
So I’ve started recording myself, and the kids, drawing using Hyperlapse to make sped-up videos.
The end results are these oddly relaxing and mesmerising videos of blank canvases steadily becoming populated by curious beasts. Here’s a 45-minute drawing squashed into just over 3 minutes:
The setup for this is quite simple. I have an LED craft light with a flat top that I balance on some books to the left of me (I’m right handed). Because the light is flat on the top, I can use some tack to secure my phone to record the video. And because Hyperlapse only has one button — start and stop recording — it’s difficult to get it wrong! The app takes care of smoothing out the kinks if I knock the light as I draw.
For me, the inspiring thing about this was that I showed my kids this video at bed-time and they loved it so much we had to watch it several times.
And then one of the boys asked for a pencil…
I watched him draw some of the monsters from memory on a sheet of paper while he was going to bed.
Maybe there’s something in this — by recording the drawing process and repeatedly watching it with them I was teaching them how to have confidence that they can draw something when in the past they might have said “I don’t know how to draw that”.
If you’ve enjoyed this, please recommend it below! And if you’d like more like this you could join my very occasional email list. I’m @stef on Twitter.
