Why kids should explore the emerging world of digital art

Parents often fail to understand or appreciate the importance of teaching art and design to kids at pre-school and elementary school education levels. Yet, these represent the key stages at which kids most often develop their personal interest in art and design, and in developing their own creative skills. This is important to understand and appreciate, because nowadays, many careers extensively draw upon such types of skills.

For example, this includes careers in advertising and promotions; animation and video; architecture; art direction; commercial photography; creative design; fashion design; fashion; furniture design; graphic design; influencer blogging; interior design; layout design; and marketing. These are in addition to careers in art, such as animator; art curator; art teacher; digital artist; fine artist; illustrator; painter; photographer; and sculptor.

By helping kids to develop their art and design skills, parents may actually be helping their children to develop future profitable careers. Helping kids to explore the emerging world of digital art can potentially tap into kids’ creative design skills and abilities from an early age. In addition, digital art can teach kids about the use of a range of new technologies, such as art and painting computer programs, and even more advanced software tools such as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.

Wacom pen tablet for digital design and eLearning

View Wacom tablets online here.

Over time, kids can also learn how to use a range of different hardware such as desktops, laptops, tablets, and graphics drawing tablets such as ‘Wacom pen tablets’ (see above). This will enable them to become true digital natives. Another important point to note about helping kids to explore the emerging world of digital art in a supervised way, is that many digital art platforms, marketplaces, and online forums, now enable people from all over the world to freely communicate with each other.

Kids can discuss and showcase their creative art projects and artworks, and they may even be able to collaborate with kids from other areas and countries on digital art collections and projects online. Digital art shared in this way can be more fulfilling for kids, especially if they are surrounded by other likeminded kids that enjoy creative art and design as much as they do. This enables them to support each other and even share design and technology tips! By supporting kids in their exploration of the emerging world of digital art, parents can also develop closer relationships with their children.

Some kids may not be interested in sports activities at an early age, and so some parents may find it more difficult to bond through shared interests in kids’ sports activities. Some parents may not understand video games well, and so may find it more difficult to share their children’s enthusiasm for video games. But parents will always be able to share their opinions on their children’s creative art projects and artworks. By showing a continued interest, and by providing supportive and constructive feedback, parents will be able to develop closer bonds with their children over time, all whilst helping their children to develop better digital art creation and appreciation skills.