Recognising Visual Giftedness

Characteristics of the Visually Gifted

Behavioral Characteristics
1, Early Evidence: Children gifted in art usually begin young, in many cases before school, and often as early as age three.

Characteristics of Artwork

1. Verisimilitude: Most children develop the desire to depict people and other subjects from the environment, however gifted children develop both the skills 2. Emergence through Drawing: and the inclination at an earlier Giftedness is first evident age. From ages 10 to 14 years through drawing with pencil or the urge to "get it right" emerges crayon and remains so until the in the form of comic strips, child is motivated to try other illustrations for science fiction, form of expression or until mythology and fantasy. Gifted drawing becomes boring. students can handle skills of shading, proportion, perspective 3. Rapidity of Development: and anatomy. Every child progress through certain stages of visual 2. Compositional Control: Gifted development: Scribbling, naming students handle picture-making scribbles which are combined. elements such as composition, Objects float freely and then are color, space and movement with related. Predictable symbols greater sensitivity. appear from the child's environment: sky, sun, birds, 3. Complexity and Elaboration: houses, trees. At ages 9 to ll a Gifted children from preschool age period of frustrations sets in as on have a sense of complexity the child measures his efforts that appears as early as the against the real world and mass symbolic stages. Most children media images. Gifted child often create schemas that are adequate jump over or through these to their needs. Gifted children stages at an accelerated pace and elaborate upon their schemas. often condense normal progress Complexity and elaboration are to short periods. directly related to sensitivity to detail and use of memory. 4. Extended Concentration: Visually gifted children stay with 4. Memory and Detail: Gifted an artistic problem longer than do children are more interested in other students. They enjoy their detail and are more inventive in work more and see more filling pictorial or three-

possibilities in the task.

dimensional space. This is due to the way they use their memories 5. Self-directness: For and because their imaginations artistically gifted children, school supply them with more ideas. is not the only place to purse their interests. They are highly self5. Sensitivity to Art Media: motivated and have the drive to Gifted work on their own. They often students immerse themselves for prefer art activity to other forms hours in practice which produces of entertainment. mastery of any medium used. They may become quickly bored 6. Possible Inconsistency with with packaged colors and combine Creative Behavior: Artistically them to achieve desired effects. gifted children may have opposite Mastery of media permits a more characteristics of those we developed, more elegant, product. associate with creativity in general. For example, risk taking is frequently cited as a hallmark 6. Random Improvisation: Gifted of the creative person. Because children often doodle, that is, they gifted students have invested a improvise with the effects of lines, great deal of themselves in shapes and patterns and appear developing mastery in a certain to be conscious of negative areas idiom, they are unwilling or or spaces between the lines. Art unable to experiment in new functions as an extended areas. conversation between form and imagination. The gifted child 7. Art as Escape: Gifted students thinks through his artwork and may use art as a retreat from creates his own meanings through responsibilities that they find his ability to invent, depict and difficult or non-gratifying. describe. 8. Fluency of Idea and Expression: Visual and conceptual fluency is perhaps the most significant characteristic of all since it lies closest to the behavior of the trained artist. Visually fluent children may have more ideas than they have time to depict. Their memory banks hold more and what is not recalled can be invented. 9. Calculating Capacity: Gifted children, from upper elementary

school age on, have what Howard Gardner in Artful Scribbles describes as a superior ability to utilize past information in new contexts.