painting and coloring only in black

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Yellow makes me feel nauseated. I only use it in my micro-macrame when I am making a rainbow because it has to be there. I can't stand to be in a room painted yellow or interact with a person wearing yellow.

Yeah. Black doesn't really make me feel bad, so perhaps this is why?

I hate yellow as well. It's my least favorite color and makes me nautious if I have to look at it for more than a few seconds; espicaly the darker mustard yellows. My favorite color is vivid kelly green, vivid blues and hot pinks. My favorite color combonation is orange and colbot blue. Flordia gators colors becuase those are the colors used an practicaly any peice of Titan A.E. (special intrest) merchindise.

I love black with white, like those converse.

I also like red and white.

I'm quite fond of most shades of purple.

A very relaxing color.

I don't like drawing in color, and it's one of the (Few) things I don't account for AS. I just don't like coloring, that's not weird.

Was your art also only black when you were four years old?

It's an interesting question, given all the other elements and theories that have cropped up in this thread.

My (mostly) NT daughter has always favored black over color. No one has really tried to talk her out of it, maybe because as with many things NT it isn't the only way she paints. First of all, she just likes the look and likes the color. Second of all, I think she is more interested in the lines and details than in the expression color brings to the object. When she is in the mood to do colorful art, she does a lovely and creative job, but more often than not she works in one color and more often than not that one color is black.

I don't think it is an AS v. NT thing, although I suspect that as with many things, if one who is AS has such a preference, it is going to be much more amplified than in someone like my daughter, who has a preference but isn't that exclusive about it or stuck with it.

How old is your daughter? I'm not talking about artistic preferences in older children but coloring and painting ONLY in black ALWAYS as a PRE-SCHOOLER. It is apparently commonly considered a "warning sign" and I'm trying to learn more about what that sign is warning of and whether the upset doctors and parents have over four-year-olds who will never use any color other than black is warranted or whether it is overblown. And also whether it is more (or less) common for toddlers on the autistic spectrum to choose only black and never any other colors.

I'm coming to think the answer is, "we don't know" since all anyone else has talked about in this thread is pre-teens and adolescents choose black as an artistic taste or statement some or most of the time. Which is okay . . . "we don't know" is still an answer and I thank everyone who has contributed to this thread.

Purple used to make me feel natious as a kid.

I think the warning sign is that an NT toddler isn't likely to make such a strongly exclusive choice. My NT daughter was definitely showing that PREFERENCE as a toddler, and has gone in and out of it since. I think it is the exclusivity, the strict adherence that makes it an AS thing, is basically what I was trying to say in talking about my daughter. An NT child may have the preference, isn't likely to make it into a rigid rule.

My daughter is 9 now, btw.

Actually, the few cases I was able to find in the literature were of apparently NT children. I haven't been able to find a single reference to an AS child doing this. (And very little explaining the phenomenon in general.) The toddlers I found in the literature who were exclusively painting and coloring in black were highly traumatized children living in an active war zone. Which, of course, makes me wonder why an AS child (me) living in a secure, middle-class, suburban home would exhibit a trait that the literature I was able to find only associates with children who have watched people be decapitated or seen their mother gunned down in the street, etc.

It just doesn't make sense. I didn't grow up in that sort of environment at all.

And it sounds like other AS children didn't exhibit the trait (at least none that have been reported here) so now I'm even *more* in the dark as to why I exhibited a trait in childhood that is generally only seen in children living in extremely bloody and traumatic times.

When I was younger I had this deep fascination over the color red. I would always hoard the red crayons, root for the sports team that was wearing the red jersey, and would be depressed if the light-bar on the roof of a police car had no red. The only answer I can provide as to why is when I like something, I tend to be overprotective over it, so if anything bad happened to something I liked, I become emotional.

Since you mentioned the color black, the post reminds me of a Public Service Ad from Japan about this autistic boy who's in class one day and the teacher instructs the students to color what they're thinking about. She observes the boy filling his entire paper in black crayon. Then he moves on to another paper to fill it in black too, and continues on this pattern for days. He's taken to see specialists who can't figure out or interrupt his pattern. Then the teacher suddenly discovers that some are not completely filled, and when she puts them next to each other they form a shape. She instructs the specialist to assemble the papers, where they find out the boy was actually making a massive picture of a whale out of hundreds of papers.

My AS son also prefers black.

He is not stressed, depressed, traumatized or upset. Really.

He is, however, very sensitive to the feel of crayons and markers on paper as opposed to pencils. The various scritchy noises and resistances really bother him. Most people don't understand this, but I have a feeling a lot of you here will.

Since he enjoys the feel of a mechanical pencil, that's what he draws with.

Recently, at age 11, he started exploring color when we had a talk about colors 'popping' and making things more dramatic on a page (ex: a red cardinal in a black-and-white background). Now, he's finally exploring color a bit... but is very picky about which tool is most comfortable for him.

Good luck to you.

I used to draw in grayscale and still do. However I can switch to colors anytime and I'm an excellent painter though I only paint on rare occassions. For me it's more practical to do grayscales since all it requires is a pencil, when I do digital art I usually take my time to color though. If your kid is gifted in the arts or has a good estetic sense, grayscale might just his/hers prefered 'style'. However it could (as mentioned) be a sign of depression, anxiety or some kind of impairment.