Digital Process Art

A student recently raised a question that went something like this:

What does the process art of young children look like in the digital age?

Here’s one answer.

Recently Cora figured out that a free drawing app that has been on our iPad includes a bunch of coloring pages. She has taken to coloring in the spaces, all in one color. It occurred to me today that she is doing this for the pleasure of seeing the spaces fill up. The image is of little consequence. As soon as she finishes a page, she often colors over her work in a new color. There is no concern for saving her work, she doesn’t usually even ask anyone to look at it.

This is the essence of process art in the lives of young children: open-ended sensory exploration.

Artistic Development – By the Numbers

Crafty Cora is starting to get interested in activity books. You know, the ones you buy at the grocery store that are full of coloring pages, mazes, and connect the dots. As a professional art educator part of me cringes at the thought of them. They were an integral part of my own childhood, however, and as such my artistic development.

This morning we are coloring by number, per her request. Just as Duncum (1988) wrote of copying, there is some merit to this activity, even if the result is not an original work of art. Here are a few thoughts on that.

• Cora is focused and concentrating on completing a task. The smile on her face at the end was evidence that she enjoyed this as much as the process.

• She is learning to see numbers in use as symbols representing actions.

• She is participating, if unwittingly at this point, in an art making tradition with a history we can explore at some later date.

Here’s to breaking our own rules, sometimes.