You will not let kids play with raw meat and make a meat dress for a doll (hello Jana Sterbak and Lady gaga). You will however provide dry noodles for safely making playful jewelry.
Noodle jewels have been around for generations. It is fun and combined with other materials, like beads, fabric, dye, and pompoms, it can get wildly creative.
Interestingly, while children have been emulating grown ups’ jewelry, a jeweler has in turn emulated children’s love for noodle art. Check out this commercial collection of “real” jewels: Al Dente – Delicacies Jewelry. This company runs a philanthropic program for the fight against hunger.
From Godzilla to Barney, and all the Jurassic Park sequels in between, it is safe to say that almost every kid has drawn a dinosaur or two at some point.
The bones of real dinosaurs are preserved and displayed all over the world. They help us understand and admire their bygone animal supremacy.
Did you know that specialists also care for their feces? Yes, dinosaur poop has its own museum! Well, actually a museum for feces that have mineralized, and turned into coprolites.
The Poozeum was first launched as an online resource in 2014, by its founder George Frandsen. Ten years later, it recently opened its physical gallery and storefront in Williams, Arizona, not far from the Grand Canyon. Poozeum holds the largest of such collections, with about 8,000 coprolites. It holds a Guinness World Record for it, and also for holding the largest coprolite (67,5 cm x 15,7 cm) ever found, which George Frandsen says likely comes from a T.rex.
Next time you draw a dinosaur, don’t you forget its coprolite. Who knows, maybe one day we will find out that the whole planet is but one humongous spinning orbiting coprolite, or a derivative thereof.
Founder George Frandsen strikes the pose at the Poozeum. Source: Poozeum, 2024.
Building a collection such as CDIC’s often means bumping into difficult questions and hurdles. Children’s drawings have nearly all vanished for centuries, even millennia. There are basically two reasons for that. One is that there is little value attached to them, and by extension children, because of the temporary nature of childhood. Either they grow too fast, or we just cannot wait for them to grow up. The other reason is that even if great value is given to learning and art made by children, it is generally a personal value shared and enjoyed in private among family members, not with the community. It is for the family scrapbook only.
In our efforts to expand the conversation about preservation, we wonder what triggers some individuals and some parents to hang on to those fragile objects. We also ask ourselves, is there a best time for families to contribute items to the collection? It is hard to say. The best time is probably when both the parent and the child agree to let the original image leave home. That is in the case of a young child. If the child has become an adult and has childhood art, likely preserved by a parent, this person may have lost interest in the image, or may want to honor the parent who kept it safe.
When a family keeps child art pieces for a long time, it looks like a positive sign for their preservation. It likely means that the initial impulse sprung from a strong bond between the child and the parent. It could however turn out to be the opposite, and the longer a family keeps the art, the more endangered it becomes. This is because like any other relationships, family bonds can fluctuate over time.
Adult children sometime grow apart from their parents or their siblings. When this happens, physical objects that they shared in the past come to take different meanings. The value and meaning of any art from childhood change, and may become dispensable. Family estrangement, when it happens, can put conservation of children’s art at risk.
The decision to preserve or not children’s art is and will remain in the hands of individuals and parents. Our participatory approach to collection development aims to add a collective or community layer to the equation. Our hope is that this will stimulate dialogue between generations, and cultural awareness.
Family estrangement has been under the scrutiny of a small number of scholars over the past ten years. They inform us that several factors can bring family members to stop interacting with one another. Family members can keep their distances for various periods of time, from a few months, to years, or for life. They can sometime grow apart gradually, without even explicitly knowing why. A pioneer on the subject is Dr. Kylie Agllias, adjunct lecturer at the University of NewCastle, in Australia. Her book Family estrangement: A matter of perspective (Routledge, 2016) is a go to reference. Gerontologist Dr.Karl Pillemer of Cornell University also authored the book Fault lines: Fractured families and how to mend them (Penguin, 2022). His book has a significant portion on resilience and reconciliation. In 2015, the British organization Stand Alone conducted a groundbreaking survey. Over eight hundred people responded. Their findings were published in the report by psychologist Dr. Lucy Blake, of the Centre for Family Research at University of Cambridge: Hidden voices: Family estrangement in adulthood, and available online. It is most revealing of some aspects of modern life.
It is a vast and complex subject, as old as storytelling itself in current and past civilizations. This ability we have to project human features and qualities to non-human animals, plants and things is so omnipresent, we just have to glance at gamer avatars, or our sport team mascots to measure its far reaching impact. It can be found in basically any art form.
A short blog post cannot dive into the intricate complexity and ramifications of anthropomorphism. This post is meant to highlight the fact that some researchers with various backgrounds are increasingly questioning how the, let’s call them traditional storytellers, are making use of anthropomorphism. So, parents, writers, illustrators, playwrights, and even clerics, pay attention because a diverse group of literary critiques, cognitive scientists, social theorists and ecologists want to talk about anthropomorphism as a double edged sword.
On one hand, there are the well-known benefits, as mentioned by Nigerian researcher Helen Adhuze, in an article titled The face and phases of anthropomorphism in children literature, “Anthropomorphized characters boost empathy in children. This relational attitude is facilitated through the human imagination operational at the various stages of human development. Essentially, anthropomorphism is a human attitude developed as a child and maintained through adulthood. It is a specific human attitude, not a childish mistake.” (Adhuze, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, Vol. 1, no. 1, 2022)
Growing up, we become experts “anthropomorphers.” Parents and educators know too well how anthropomorphic characters can be efficient attention grabbers, and motivation boosters for children engagement. For example, take this school activity developed by Creative Exchange, a collaboration project of the England Arts Council and Durham University (United Kingdom). The activity shows “How to use anthropomorphism to release children’s creativity,” to develop their imagination and collaborative skills. The vast majority of contents in elementary school libraries include anthropomorphic images.
Not everyone agrees that anthropomorphism has only benefits, and some give it a thumb down, pointing to what may loom in its shadow. We find much of these warnings in an exhibition catalogue, of Animals Are Us: Anthropomorphism in Children’s Literature; Celebrating the Peter Solomon Collection. The exhibition was presented in 2021 at the Houghton Library, in Cambridge. The catalogue by Thomas Hyry and several others, offers a great reading experience, and includes awesome illustrations. Four contributors penned the chapter “The Pitfalls and Potential of Anthropomorphism in children Literature.” It shows clearly how the practice more than often perpetuates stereotypes and demonstrates blatant lack of representation and diversity. We cannot help, it seems, but project both our virtues and flaws into whatever we want to make more human. The authors raise important red flags, and see greater awareness as an important step for better storytelling.
They close with a glimpse of optimism, saying that “as fields such as childhood studies, psychology, and literacy education developed their understanding of the child reader, children’s literature also evolved to position children as more purposeful, thoughtful, and agentive”(Animals Are Us exhibition catalogue, p.23)
In 2014, psychologists Patricia Ganea, Caitlin Canfield, and Kadria Simons-Ghafari investigated and concluded that anthropomorphism will actually inhibit children’s ability to learn actual facts about the animal world. It is, they argued, as if the fantastic nature of anthropomorphic characters “may not only lead to less learning but also influence children’s conceptual knowledge of animals.” In their article Do cavies talk? The effect of anthropomorphic picture books on children’s knowledge about animals (Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 5, 2014), they explain that there is a range of anthropomorphism that goes between a completely fantastic and a partially realistic characterization. They saw that when selecting books for their students, teachers tend to favor less realistic images, and rarely choose books where animal characters are shown in their natural environment. This, they say, may bring children to a lack of understanding of biological aspects of animals. In other words, children should be told when they are exposed to anthropomorphized creatures, told that it is not factual information, even when this might seems obvious to adults.
If you think educators, psychologists and literary critics are the only ones interested in the subject, think twice. Scholars in computer sciences, as well as religious studies are also showing interest in how children go about anthropomorphism. See what some of them have to say in this amazing book When Children Draw Gods A Multicultural and Interdisciplinary Approach to Children’s Representations of Supernatural Agents, published by Springer in 2023, as part of a book series New Approach to the Scientific Study of Religion. The chapter by Gregory Dessart and Pierre-Yves Brandt, Humanness and Non-Humanness in Children’s Drawings of God: A Case Study from French-Speaking Switzerland is of particular interest. It presents a case study with a focus on de-anthropomorphization as a progressive process. According to them, children undertaking religious education could be less inclined to portrait God with human traits.
As I reflect about the scientific articles cited above, isn’t it interesting that ecologically minded educator and religion educator might each hope that children be less impacted by anthropomorphism each for a different motive, the first for giving access to biological facts, and the other for less human-like representations of the divine? The socio-emotional power of anthropomorphism is immense. Is it too strong or misleading? It is an important question.
The visual depiction of sound and music has kept musicians and artists busy for a very long time. The evolution of music notation is one of many examples of this lasting connection between the two forms of expression. One could argue that music notation probably has more do to with writing than drawing. The graphic display of soundwaves seems a more direct way to show sound. However I have never seen or heard of a musician using an image of soundwaves as partition.
In illustrations, say of someone shouting or playing trumpet, we are used to see lines coming out of a mouth or an instrument. The illustrator will sometime accompany the lines with onomatopoeia, to specify what the viewer should hear. Another example is that of making voices visible in comic strips with the three basic balloons of thought, talk and scream, and their many variations in emotional tone.
With the advent of cinema, video, and audio recording, image and sound eventually came together in a such way that we tend to forget their independence. Cinema and video is about moving images, and artists have always shown interest in exploring their relation to sound and music.
One of them is Danny Clay, who takes music notation to new playful heights by inviting students to invent and draw their own music notation icons for composing. This is a sound to image to music process.
Other artists committed to explore sound and images, is the duo Heike Liss and Fred Frith who improvise the sound and the image that emerge as one, during a live performance. This may appear a simultaneous act of creation, but the sound leads the drawing in this artistic performance. It is a sound to image process.
The simultaneous production of sound and images has become quite sophisticated with the aid of digital programs and devices. One prolific artist in this field is Benjamin Heim, who works both individually or with numerous collaborators on large scale projects. This is a simultaneous music-image process where the music determines the movement and duration of the image.
In this relation between audio and visual expression, the preoccupation with visually depicting sound seems the main concern. Only with moving images, do creators preoccupy themselves with what images sound like. But what about still images? Are they condemned to remain silent? The only sounds that are connected to still images are the ones made while the image is created. The only movements connected to fixed images are the past movements of its making, and the movements of the eyes of the viewer.
Luckily, artists never stop searching, and some are exploring sound as it emerges from images, movement, or movement making images. Anna Ridler is one of them. She uses traditional visual media with contemporary digital and audio devices, to created images out of movement and sound.
In conclusion, it is worth mentioning that there are now ways to draw on screen with movement and sounds without even touching the screen. Google partnered with CreateAbility Inc. to create Sound Canva. Go ahead and try it out. Tutorials are available too.
Below, André Franquin’s Gaston signs office documents with a deafening jackhammer.
Gaston. Ink on paper, by Léo Beaulieu, c1974. Source: CDIC-CIDE.
Children should mean the world to us all, but still so many are suffering, even dying, east and west, north and south. This November 20th, we join a large number or not-for-profit organizations worldwide in denouncing the neglect and aggression on children.
Let us all familiarize ourselves better with children’s rights, and take part in open dialogue and civic participation in support of children’s safety and growth. There are many good sources of information at our fingertips on Internet. Take for example the research and reports by KidsRights, based in Amsterdam. Their findings are up to date and their programs involve youth directly, in nearly forty countries.
Meanwhile, as reported from the United Nation’s meeting of the committee on Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Issues this past October, you could hear national representatives throw the blame at each other regarding children’s safety worldwide. It is certainly a positive thing that they have the conversation, but the tone and good will should definitely improve.
In Canada this November 25th, the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children will host a webinar titled Youth Researchers’ Peer-to-Peer PAR Journey and Findings. For this occasion, youth researchers will discuss their work and findings. The webinar is open to children and youth who are interested. It is free and pre-registration is required.
Explore mandalas and you will find one of the most versatile family craft activities you can think of. From a modest pencil circle from which you scribble spontaneously, to an intricate meticulously drawn and harmoniously colored mandala, you will find the one for you, by you. You might only want to pick one ready for coloring, or put together a few found objects, for an ephemeral mandala.
The tradition of the mandala has transcended cultures, spiritualities and now is even found in our pop consumer world. Profound and superficial all at once, that is how wide and deep the mandala’s reach is. There is no way around its mesmerizing beauty and the joy it brings. Individually or collectively, making mandalas is a way to deepen our sense of patience, connection, and introspection.
Read Joshua J. Mark‘s richly illustrated and well researched article on the subject, published by the much praised World History Encyclopedia. Several artists have made mandalas their trademark, so to speak. Thaneeya McArdle interviewed mandala artist Stephanie Smith for her Art is Fun blog. The perogies mandala looks savory. See also the artisan products by Jamie Lockeart. The meditation benches are awesome.
Kalachakra thangka painted in Sera Monastery, Tibet. Photo by Kosi Gramatikoff. Exploration of esoteric dreams of the Himalayas. Source: ResearchGate, 23 February, 2022.
Recent posts discussed miniature art and paper dolls. It seems fitting that we talk about clothing design that children and teenagers can indulge in.
We begin with two simple consumer products that will appeal to younger children and inspire them to create, express themselves and develop their dexterity. We found two companies that sell complete miniature kits. MasterMind Toys offers several kits including, clothing, knitting, tie dye, handbags and more. At, JrToyCanada, you can buy a fashion studio kit which includes a 30 cm mannequin.
There is also a lot of drawing and family fun to have with online seller Picture This Clothing. This company lets kids use their own images and turn them into wearable personalized items. Also worth a visit is DesignX. There, we find camps and courses that will appeal to children of all ages. Their captivating programs include textile design, toy design and upcycling. Have fun on the runway!
Collage in yellow. Yvon, c1965. Source: CDIC-CIDE.
We may be way beyond the golden age of paper dolls, but their enduring presence over centuries does not lie. They are fun, engaging for toddlers, and usually affordable for parents. Today, we owe their survival more to book publishers and artisans than toy makers. It can be tricky to navigate through what is on the market, if you are mindful of stereotypes, diversity and body image issues that can arise. In our opinion, Dansereau by Dominique Dansereau and Paper Thin Personas by Rachel Cohen offer the best commercial options.
Better yet, say Kelly Burstow of Be A Fun Mom, make your own, from family photos. Use your photo cutout to draw a silhouette and create a paper wardrobe. Drawing them is also so simple. Making a paper doll brings a fine opportunity to draw, cut and manipulate images and to stimulate imagination for family story telling.
There is of course the long history of paper dolls and a vast vintage market out there, for history buffs and collectors. Paper dolls and the fashion industry are inseparable. For this reason, like their 3D cousins, paper dolls too carry a long history of woman’s body representation and gender roles. For a brief women’s perspective on the history of this “innocent” toy, see this documented articles published in 2016 on the (American) National Women’s History Museum website.
On the contemporary arts scene for grownups, it is impossible to ignore the life size realistic works by New York artist October Lane. The Paper Doll Project makes you think and will serve as an excellent helper to parents with teens.
Clothing in color sample. Source: Dansereau.co, 23 January 2022.
With the successive imposition of lockdowns and access restrictions during the pandemic, artists and other creative people are rediscovering the charms of tiny art. Reports about free little galleries or FLAG, have proliferated in the past year. The Seattle Met, the Washington Post (twice), TimeOut, Urbanicity, the CBC, the Toronto Star, even the Smithsonian Magazine have all showed interest in little galleries.
According to these reports, FLAGs are already thriving across the United States in Seattle, Portland, Austin, Oakland, Phoenix Atlanta, Washington D.C., Brooklyn, Hyattsville, as well as in Edmonton and more recently Hamilton, Canada. Artist and self-proclaimed FLAG tracker Elaine Luther has spotted some in Sweden, Polan and Mexico. She created a website to help us follow the expansion of the empire.
This growing phenomenon is good news for artists. It provides a much needed outlet for their works and also a way to reach out to a diverse audience, both locally and online. It is also good news for kids and for community spirit, because it is inclusive of all sorts of works, as long as it fits the space, and everyone can leave or take a piece of their art. It is the same exchange system as the well-known free little library network.
Washington State artists are definitely leading the trend. Stacy Milrani was one of the first to launch and now seemingly has one of the busiest FLAG. Sculptor Jennyfer McNeely took the adventure to new dimensions with the creation of fictional curator Margaret Supperfield, a doll with her own Instagram account. As for long time professional doll maker, Katy Strutz, the appeal of free little galleries was irresistible.
Interestingly, this newly found passion in miniature art comes at a time when, at the supersize end of the spectrum, so called immersive art is also taking off. Now attracting renowned large museum institutions, immersive shows of images by Van Gogh, Klimt, Schiele, Klee and also contemporary artists are scheduled in places likes Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Toronto, Bordeau, Dubai, Shangai, Macao and Tokyo. These events use new technologies to attract new audiences to visual arts and boost tourism. Bea Mitchell’s top 11 list in her Blooloop article is enough to appreciate the contrast this is compared to miniature art.
Miniature art has long been part of major historical collections. It also never left the contemporary art scene, even if it had not been considered blockbuster by large institutions, with big buildings. The Biennale Internationale d’ArtMiniature (BIAM) has presented miniature works in the small northern town of Ville-Marie, Quebec for 30 years. More than 10 countries were represented last summer. Across the pond, in Paris, visitors have a few more days to visit the Small is Beautiful exhibition. At this event by Encore Productions and Fever, 20 artists present their miniature works, and children can take part in miniature art workshops.
Pictured below is the latest free little gallery that just opened its tiny door in Hamilton, Canada. As I visited it with a limited edition contribution of my own, a local artist was already there with her own contribution. An initiative by art teacher Matt Coleman, the Mappleside Museum of Miniature Art (MMoMA) is however a bit of a misnomer. We get the pun of the acronym, but a museum usually has a collection conservation mandate, as well as educational programs, while a gallery shows art for trading purpose. The MMoMA is actually a free little gallery.
Top: Artist busy at the newly opened Mappleside Museum of Miniature Art in Hamilton, Canada. Bottom: Northernlights, small limited print of pencil drawing. Léo Beaulieu, 2010. Source: CDIC-CIDE.
