How Drawing Encourages Inventing New Ideas
A dog with butterfly wings. A house shaped like a shoe. A robot that runs on candy instead of batteries. These small, odd inventions are exactly what happens when a child is given a pencil and permission to imagine something that has never existed before.
What Inventing New Ideas Looks Like
Inventing means coming up with something new — not necessarily a groundbreaking creation, but even a small variation on something familiar: a new kind of house, an animal nobody's seen, a machine that does something silly and specific. For a child, invention often starts small and stays playful, and that's exactly the point.
How Drawing Grows Inventing New Ideas
A "what if" thought is fleeting on its own, but drawing turns it into something concrete a child can look at, add to, and build further ideas from. Once an invented creature or machine exists on paper, it becomes real enough to keep developing — a new feature here, a new detail there — in a way that pure imagination alone doesn't easily allow. That process of externalizing an idea and then continuing to build on it is at the heart of invention, in art and well beyond it.
Simple Activity to Try
Try a "mash-up" drawing: ask your child to invent an animal that's part one creature and part another — say, part elephant, part butterfly — and draw what it might look like. Ask a few questions about how it lives or what it eats to keep the invention growing.
Tips for Parents and Teachers
- Ask open "what if" questions to spark new ideas.
- Avoid steering an invented drawing back toward realism.
- Save invented ideas in a folder so they can be revisited and built on later.
- Treat silly or impossible inventions as successes, not distractions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn't inventing things just fantasy, not a real skill?
Invention starts with imagining something that doesn't exist yet, which is the same basic mental move behind real-world inventions, stories, and designs — the skill is real even when the subject is playful.
What if the "invention" looks a lot like something that already exists?
That's a completely normal part of the process. New ideas are almost always built from familiar pieces recombined in a new way.
Can invented drawings connect to other subjects, like writing?
Yes — an invented creature or machine can easily become the subject of a story, giving invention and storytelling a natural way to support each other.
Conclusion
Every strange, invented creature on paper is a small act of bringing something new into the world. Give those ideas room to grow across more than one drawing. See also how drawing encourages combining ideas and how drawing encourages imaginary worlds, or browse coloring pages for more inspiration.