In 1988, Edith Derdyk’s work How to think children’s drawing was published for the first time, which has become a classic reference in studies on the children’s graphic universe. Panda Educação now launches a new edition, revised, and expanded, where the author shares her experience of more than thirty years as an artist and educator, in a proposal and reflective text that reframe the connections between art and education, based on the sensitive observation of drawings produced by children.

Derdyk starts from an overview of the paths of drawing that is born from the perspective of adults and their cultural landscape. The relationship between the graphics and the gesture, the line and the paper, the body and the hand movement are some of the ways that the author takes to launch a new look at the expressive languages of childhood. Throughout the pages, she addresses issues present in teachers’ daily lives, such as imitation and copying, speech, writing, observation, memory, and imagination.

Then, the author offers the educator a first approach to artistic production at different moments in history, and thus presents different ways of thinking about drawing. Artists from different generations and countries, from Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso and Van Gogh to Paul Klee and Regina Silveira, gain brief biographies interspersed with the critical and contextual analysis of their lines and lines. The new edition includes an unprecedented chapter to revere the expanded line beyond paper and pencil, based on the works of four contemporary artists: Eva Hesse, Walter de Maria, José Resende and Chiharu Shiota.

The book ends with some practical proposals and interpretation exercises experienced, reformulated, and revisited by the author over three decades of work - an opportunity for teacher readers to experience new ways of thinking about drawing. Aimed at the public interested in understanding the child’s thinking and the artist’s vision expressed through graphic language, Ways of thinking drawing is an invitation to explore a language that crosses history, which is present in all areas of knowledge and that has the power to build sensitive and subjective ways of thinking.

Edith Derdyk has held group and individual exhibitions since 1981 in Brazil and abroad. She has been awarded several prizes and is the author of artistic education books, such as Linhas de horizonte and The drawing of the human figure, and the author / illustrator of children’s works, such as O collector of words and A porta da terra. Currently, she coordinates free and extension courses, in addition to the graduate course “Walking as a method for art and education”, in A Casa Tombada.