Saturday, November 2, 2013

The line game

We're recently started playing the "line game" - a two-person game handed down from Teresa's parents. The rules are: One person draws a simple squiggle, and the other person uses the squiggle as the basis of a drawing.

Drawing has been something we've been working on, in a low-emphasis way, for a while.  Way back when we visited her in the orphanage, we brought some markers.  Elena had a unique approach to drawing, where she would pull a marker out of the box, pop the cap off, and very carefully make the tiniest dot on the piece of paper. Then she'd recap the marker, put it back in the box, and repeat with another color.
April 2011 - Elena draws, a dot at a time.
That's a very process-oriented approach, and one I suspect stemmed from limited practice time with markers and crayons.  The orphanage doesn't have a lot of money, so I think there's little room for consumables like paper and crayons.

It took some time after Elena got home before she actually began scribbling and drawing, and so it's pretty satisfying to see her actually draw something. It's been just recently - in the past month or so - that she's been able to consistently draw something recognizable.  Which brings us around to the line game.

We started the line game with Elena squiggling and me drawing, but just today she decided that she wanted to draw.  So I made a red "V" shape, slid the paper to Elena... and she made this:

A line game birdie.

A very recognizable little bird.  From her own imagination, in her own hand.
 

1 comment:

  1. I love her bird. That is so precious. Cava had difficulty doing anything creative because he wasn't exposed to any avenues that allowed him to be. He didn't have crayons or markers or clay, so, at first, he could not create something unless he had a picture to go by. It took him awhile before he began to draw anything on his own. Now I love it when he brings home things he created in art at school.

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