Just as people are born with a good singing voice, some people have a natural ability to draw realistically. You may have a classmate who can draw things that look just as they do in real life or maybe that’s your talent.
Jennifer Drake, an associate professor of psychology at Brooklyn College in New York City, studies these kids, who are known as “precocious realists.” Precocious (pronounced pruh-CO-shuhs) is a word used to describe a child who has developed a certain ability earlier than usual.
“These are kids who are able to draw [very] realistically, and that’s one of the earliest signs of giftedness that you see in children’s drawing,” Drake says of her research subjects. While most 3-year-olds would use simple things such as sticks to represent, for example, an apple, precocious realists would be able to draw something round that actually resembles the fruit.
There is a specific skill that allows these young artists to excel at drawing realistically. “You have to avoid the overall context and focus on the detail,” Drake said. “And so what we find is, these precocious realists really excel at this, [they are] really able to focus on the detail and avoid the whole.”
Many of these kids have what psychologist Ellen Winner describes as the “rage to master.” They like to draw and improve their ability so much, they’re making art all the time. Drake says, “It’s this idea that these children have [natural] motivation to create and to draw. And so they’re not motivated by external rewards.”
For Jarrett Krosoczka, discovering his love for art had nothing to do with getting rewarded. Long before he was writing and illustrating best-selling graphic novels such as the Lunch Lady series, he just loved to draw.
“When I revisit the sketchbooks I kept as a teenager, I’m not even looking at the artistic process but looking at the emotional journey I was on,” Krosoczka says. Drawing is about understanding your emotions and what you see and experience in the world around you, he says.
“It’s like a form of meditation. If you can take your thoughts away from how it’s going to come out … and just focus on the fact that you’re making marks on a page and be in that moment,” he says. “And for me, it centers me and it’s escapism. It’s a form of processing.”
He thinks anyone — gifted or not — can benefit from that. When the coronavirus pandemic started and kids needed activities to fill their time, Krosoczka began streaming art classes online called “Draw Every Day.”
These classes are available to watch on Krosoczka’s YouTube channel. They cover topics such as sketching with charcoal, depicting motion in your doodles and how colors are associated with certain moods.
Although he has watched his students improve their skills, that’s not Krosoczka’s main objective. “It’s not about whether or not this piece comes out good,” he says. “You should be enjoying the process, and every single piece that you make, you’re learning something for the next piece.”
