Neither Willy nor I are great artists, so it never surprised us that Woo showed very little inclination to draw anything at all. Although he produced coherent stuff at daycare with the fabulous N, most of the artwork that we received from him for the first four and a half years of his life was pretty much scribbling on paper, with little effort to create forms or tell a story. Goose followed much in his footsteps, but we never really put too much emphasis on it for either lil. They were happy with their art, so we were happy.

We started to see significant change when they started school here. There was obviously some emphasis on colouring and drawing at school, and they seemed to produce colouring pages where the lines were mostly identified, and free art where there were some forms with eyes and mouths that generally fell into the categories of family members or dinosaurs. Something has changed in the last few weeks, however, and both lils are (mass) producing art that has clearly identified subjects and covers pretty much anything imaginable. We were stumped as to why both lils all of a sudden figured out how to draw things. People, buildings, mountains, dragons, a variety of scenes were all of a sudden popping up in their drawings.

The mystery was solved last week when I asked the lils what they were doing at the art table. “Playing Draw Something”, was the response I got. Draw Something is a game that is similar to pictionary, available on Android and iOS devices. You play against friends (or strangers), and draw pictures that your opponent has to guess. It’s addictive and a time waster, and I completely underestimated the impact it would have on the lils, that their fascination with watching me play would teach them both how to draw so quickly. This clearly isn’t the only thing that they are learning from, but the influence is very apparent to both Willy and I. Maybe there is something to this technology thing… although this really makes me want to start playing pictionary with them.