Even in adults perception is not the same as viridical representation. How often does a photograph of a person correspond to what we see when we look at her? Is it not commonplace to say, oh, that’s not what she really'' looks like, the camera didn't quite capture’’ her? Of course, it did, the camera must, but what’s on the print isn’t what we see in our mind, and in our usual H. sapiens egoism, we take the latter as reality. Likewise if we see photographs of familiar objects under unusual lighting or in strange presentations, we may not recognize them without considerable thought. And then after we figure out what they are, it becomes easy and unconscious, because we have trained our visual cortex to translate what comes in the eye to what we expect when we see that object.
There can be no important difference between a child and adult retina and low-level image processing hardware; hence differences in drawing must relate to motor skills, the trivial case, and, more interestingly, with a failure of the twain to negotiate agreement on how you convey an image, e.g. agreement on the rules of perspective. That is, I’d say drawing is really a sort of HTML for images, and it takes a while for the child to learn the standard adult version.
Most Kids lack the coordination to draw in any sort of realistic style. They don’t have warped perceptions they just dont’ have the skills to depict it “correctly”
good links wiggum - the second has excellent examples of what I was meaning. My three year old has not quite yet mastered drawing, but when she does I will certainly ask her why she is missing out the body. My 5 and 6 years olds have already forgotten
I don’t think that’s true; it’s a flaw in representation, not dexterity; the children I have observed (and my daughter in particular) draw people without a torso at one stage then a few weeks/montha after, draw people with a torso - but the former pictures are no less neat or careful than the latter, they are just less diagrammatically correct.
I have a large hardback book in which all of the pages were blank (it’s not a drawing book, it’s a bulking dummy from a publisher) and I am keeping a record of the development of my children’s artistic skills; On the page dated 8th July 2000, there is a picture titled ‘Stephanie and David being attacked by pink ants in the garden’ - neither of the drawn figures posess a separate torso/head, whereas on 26th August 2000, in the picture ‘Daddy being attacked by wasps, Mummy is very worried’ both of the figures have a clearly separate torso and head, but that is the only difference; the former picture is every bit as neat as the latter and the change in style was quite abrupt.
[sub]Before anybody starts to imagine that my children have some sort of psychotic obsession with agressive invertebrates, I should point out that both pictures happen to depict real events.[/sub]
While I don’t recall learning to draw torsos, I clearly remember the very moment I learned to draw a horizon.
Lying on the basement floor by the fireplace, I had a stack of drawings where the bottom edge of the paper was the “land” and anything over it was sky. Then, for some reason I drew a line about 1/4 of the way up and decided everything under that line was land. Woohoo! More dinosaurs per page!
I think it’s just a learned thing that takes time to register. My son, just turned three, is in the “Big circle with a face” school of people drawing. Obviously he knows that a tummy is, and if you ask him where on his drawing is the tummy, he’ll point to somewhere below the face (sometimes he even draws a belly button) but the idea of drawing them as seperate units hasn’t come up yet. One day the lightbulb will go off and that’ll be the new way. Heck, it took mankind forever and a day to figure out linear perspective and the color science that came out of impressionism – what do you want from a three year old?
I think an element that hasn’t been considered here yet is children’s concept of the act of drawing. I would argue that realistic representation is not intuitive. When we give a child a crayon and paper and demonstrate a drawing, the child may get the idea that something (mommy, the dog, the tree) is being represented, but I suspect that the concept of realistic, two dimensional representation has to be learned. They don’t see the world differently, but they understand drawing differently.
It is also difficult to tell how much of older children’s drawing skill has been taught and how much discovered. As some have mentioned in this tread, adults will usually attempt in some way to correct “flaws” in children’s drawing styles. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I do suspect that it leads to some of the odd stylistic representations that older children tend to produce.
All of this is my own wag. There is an extremely extensive body of research on this topic.
It seems to me that the way to test this would be to show kids pictures with or without various elements, and ask them what they are. If a child honestly doesn’t recognize the torso as a body part, then a limbed head should be more recognizable to a child than a full-body figure, but if it’s just a problem with creating the drawing, then the more “realistic” picture should be more recognizeable.
I’ve read about how what children draw indicate what they see. Apparantly we learn about the world by building and revising theories. They did an experiment where they had children draw water in a glass. They drew a rectangle with a line perpendicular to the glass edges to indicate water.
Than they had the children draw the glass tipping over. The children drew diagonal lines to indicate the glass is tilted, but the water line remains perpendicular to the edges of the glass rather than horizontal the way it would in real life.
At around a certain age, all children start to draw the line horizontally.
So that’s not totally related, but it’s interesting, right?
