Crossposted at Ellie Castellanos.com/Mama's Blog
Ellie’s sense of perspective, artistically speaking, has always been very good. From a young age, she could draw two airplanes and you could tell that one was farther from you than the other. I can’t draw worth a damn, so this ability has always been kind of wondrous to me.
I like to keep an eye on where Ellie gets her inspiration from. What catches her eye and why? From time to time I post “What Ellie finds interesting”, which is one of my favorite features, as the information comes straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Ellie is always taking photos of various things as we’re out and about, and I get a kick out of seeing what caught her attention. It gives me a little insight into how her mind works.
So when I saw these two illustrations on her ipad, I had to look at them for a minute to figure out what they were.
Clearly, they’re water related. But what is that gray thing? A strange boat, maybe, or a water tower? Then I saw this:
Just like when we’re out and about and Ellie takes photos, she also “takes photos” off the internet, in the form of screen grabs (which she figured out how to do a long time ago on her own, of course). I direct your attention to the middle lower border of the photo. Do you see that funny looking faucet? Now look again at the illustrations.
So I thought that was pretty cool that she picked a small detail like the faucet out of the photo and drew her own interpretation of it, but I’d like to look at the illustrations again a little more carefully. After looking at the first one again:
it’s pretty obvious that we’re inside the tub full of water, looking up at the faucet. It’s kind of miraculous to me that she can imagine herself in that position and figure out how much of the faucet might be showing and what it would look like.
The next one was a little trickier. It almost looks like the faucet is facing the wrong direction, as the water is behind it. For a minute I thought, “Oh, well, I guess Ellie’s sense of perspective isn’t infallable.” but that would be stupid of me, because Ellie’s sense of perspective IS infallable!!
Look at it again:
From the perspective of the tub, it looks like we’re directly under the faucet, where the water could come spilling out almost onto our heads. So why is the water on the other side, like it’s outside the tub?
Look again at the photo that inspired Ellie to begin with and see if you can figure it out more quickly than I did.
Do you see it? It’s the pattern on the wall, which if the wall reached all the way around the room would be facing you if you were inside the tub looking up. That’s what you would see.
She’s able to extrapolate all that and make these amazing drawings, all because she liked the look of that faucet, which most people wouldn’t even notice in that photo.
And they call her intellectually disabled. Uh-huh. Sure she is.
As an additional note, all my dreams have come true. I found a program in LA called Exceptional Minds Studio that teaches software suites like Adobe and Photoshop to autistic teens and adults. We have our first two week workshop in July.