The cartoons drawn are not the way kids draw. If you know a children’s art teacher, they can describe the developmental stages of how children learn to draw. Those kinds of stylized eyes, cat legs, round head, etc. are not what those things actually look like on a real subject, and not what a kid sees – they are stylized symbols that we later learn to associate with eyes, feet, head, etc. You will never see a young kid drawing that way naturally, because they haven’t yet developed enough to have learned the symbol vocabulary of adults. In kids, there is a distinct stage when this happens, and it shows in children’s art work (to the chagrin of art teachers everywhere who watch as kids get socialized and start abandoning their natural instincts and start copying symbols they think they are supposed to draw.)
So a child that age will never invent drawings like that, because those features aren’t seen in real life; the question becomes can they copy drawings like that (that were invented by an adult with the symbol vocabulary) so precisely when they don’t actually see the original as anything more than relatively meaningless squiggly lines.
As @Weasel-Rah pointed out, I think it is impossible for a baby that age, having infantile muscular development, (or maybe anyone) to draw very precisely using that hand position, especially if he isn’t even looking at a source of the squiggly lines to copy them precisely.
It just doesn’t work, even if you ignore the video fakery analysis.
That baby moves really weird. Not only is there really impressive control for a pen grip that gives me tendinitis just thinking about it, but look at the way she turns the pages and rubs her eyes. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but something’s up.
Yes, totally (the drawing bits, that is). There was an actual baby drawing or fingerpainting, and that is the source/master/framing footage upon which the marker, hand, and drawings were overlain within their specific ‘stage’ area. The actual footage of an adult drawing was filmed at an equivalent angle and timed/edited to coincide with the master footage’s transition actions, like flipping a page.
I agree, that’s one of the hardest hand positions to use, but makes sense considering how small the hands are to the implement. the circles are impressive no matter the grip.
This could be fake, could also be a human with one of those savant like qualities popping up.
So weird we can’t trust video these days and that is only going to get worse, if our own experiential senses aren’t to be believed, what do we fall back on for veracity?
I spent several years as an art teacher to young students, and i disagree.
Everything this child is supposedly drawing is something its seen, these aren’t original illustrations, they are just really well executed reproductions. i’ve seen very young kids on the spectrum that could reproduce most anything you set in front of them, but couldn’t create a new image of something you asked for that they didn’t know how to draw already. they’d obsessively get on kicks of drawing the same characters, and could draw them with very little apparent attention. not saying that is what this is, just saying as someone who has taught art to young kids this isn’t out of the realm of plausibility, the outlier is the extra young age. i did stuff at an extra young age that people were taken aback by, as do many kids. that being said, as someone who programs computers, it is also very possibly a fake.
i can see why the judge is out so long on this one even with actual experts weighing in.
But the extra young age is the crucial point of @muser ‘s argument, i.e. an age this kid wouldn’t have learned this kind of stylised shape vocabulary yet. I could believe a three or four year old doing this (apart from the jerky hand movements). This kid looks between 18 and 24 months.
What what what??? Does this mean Skippy the kangaroo playing piano is gasp fake? Damn you internetz, damn you. Another childhood fantasy ruined. shakes fist at sky, clutches pearls, faints onto conveniently-placed couch
when duplicating an existing drawing exactly you aren’t even employing a stylised shape vocabulary, so that would not be a very good point to be the crucial one.
secondly that stylised shape vocabularies are the very first drawing styles children engage in at very early ages. there is a reason these overly simplified animation/illustration styles appeal to such a young age. so it isn’t outlandish to think a non neuro typical early developed child could exhibit such skills. i get that all the armchair experts will be dead certain in their convictions both ways, but i also understand why the experts have had such difficulty weighing in. if it were so easily clear cut that’d be quite silly of all of them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it could easily be either because both are within the realm of possibility and each is impressive for different reasons. i can’t wait to find out either way.
