Why do kids draw faces the way they do?

Factual Questions
1

Y’know, with the eyes way too high up on the face.

I recently attended my kindergardener’s curriculum fair and noted that nearly every child drew faces in this manner. I did the same as a child and remembered my astonishment when an art teacher informed me that the eyes were actually positioned much lower.

I am tempted to say that this is a result of the eyes’ serving as the upper border of the region of the face that we use for facial recognition, but would be happier with a less WAGGY response.

2

I concur with your WAG. The forehead isn’t interesting, so it is left out.

3

Hmm… Somewhere I have a book that (as a small part) describes the stages of mental development of a child as seen through their drawings, “Visual Thinking” by Rudolf Arnheim. I’ll see if I can dig up my copy, I have long since forgotten his conclusions, but I vividly remember the scrawled drawings by children.

4

But maybe that’s how they see adults.

Because they are always looking up to see us they can’t see the forhead.

5

Concur with AndyJ here.

I’ve also seen a lot of young kids draw trees as enormous trunks topped with a tiny tuft of leaves.

6

People do study these things, and what they found was that when preschoolers are first learning to draw, they get feedback from the adults around them as to what constitutes a “face”. Either Mommy says, “Oh, nice picture!”, or Mommy says, “Um…” And most of the time Mommy will actually draw a sample face for the child to copy. So kids learn how a basic face should look by copying from an adult.

I can’t find an exact cite for it offhand, but here’s something close,

http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/Psychology/PSYC54/V.Notes.html

Now, as for why the eyes on kindergartners’ drawings are so far up the face, I’d chalk it up to “the forehead not being interesting”. Humans focus on the eyes because that’s where the personality is. Foreheads are so very dull.

7

Psshh… ANd they don’t even have proper perspective. I bet you your kid draws hands like they’re round disks with little sticks for fingers pointing off them, huh? And feet are ovals. Man, kids are so DUMB, they can’t even draw a perfect form at the age of six, Geez…

8

I don’t have any answers for you, but if someone else does, I’m just as interested as you are. I was just wondering about this the other day because my child absolutely loves to draw and creates numerous masterpieces every single day. lol I love the way children draw.

9

Even adults make this error. Adults often draw hands too small, too. The OP’s WAG is probably right–it’s a matter of people’s perceptions of what’s “important.”

I was lucky enough to have some out-of-school art classes, where they taught me about correct proportions. Eyes are halfway down the head. The hand is about the right size to cover the face (chin to brows). If I hadn’t learned these things, I’m sure I’d still be making these errors.

10

I have in front of me a drawing from my daughter, almost precisely 5.5 years old. The head is disproportionately large, but the eyes are pretty much between half and two thirds the way up the head. They are probably centered in perspective if you include the bow on top of her head. The hands are proportional to the arms, which are a tad short, but the legs are proportional to the body. BTW, the hands have three fingers but they are not sticks. There is no neck. Basically it’s not so different from many cartoons.

To be fair my daughter has pretty good control and interesting concepts for drawing (my son is another story altogether). Kids at this age have differing levels of control of precise motor movements. Also, as I believe AndyJ said they have a different perspective on the world. I happen to make it a point of lowering myself to their viewpoint when I speak to a child, this may have aided my daughter’s sense of perspective.

When my daughter was between three and four her class had each of the children draw a self portrait. These selfportraits were then silkscreened onto a little kerchief for the parents to purchase for about a dollar. Some of the pictures were no more than a blob, some were fairly well done for that age. This has to do with both fine motor skills and the way people process information. This is also one of those things that can be practised, to some extent, but also requires talent.

IME this continues on into adulthood, some people can draw, others can’t. For whatever reason, some people that can draw have difficult in rendering people very well. Many artists seem to have difficulty with hands.

11

Here’s one:

Why do kids always color trees as being brown (and adults tell them to do so)? Has anyone looked at a tree lately? At least here in N. Amer., nearly all of them have grayish bark.

12

So how do Klingon children draw faces?

13

The reason children draw this why and adults don’t is that most adults don’t draw. Ask an adult with little artistic acumen to draw a face and it will come out more or less they way they would have drawn it at about twelve or thirteen, the age at which most people’s drawing skills stop progressing.

In addition to misplacing the eyes, the following errors are common: the eyes are too close together, the tend to slant downward towards the center of the face, and they are too large. The ears are either not visible when a face is looked at straight on, or else they are too small and too high up. The head is too wide at the top, and too narrow towards the chin. The mouth is typically too narrow, and the nose to high and too short.

At least some of these errors may be culturally based. It is known, for instance, that members of some southwestern indian tribes have difficulty copying a square, and tend to make the sides bow out.

I have taught drawing at the junior high level and have asked my students why they think people misplace the eyes. A common speculation is that we get “thrown off” because we think of the face as the space below the hairline, and we somehow fail to account for how much of the head is above it. maybe if there were more perfectly bald people we would be less prone to this error.

An interesting sidelight: if you take all of the common errors I cited above and exaggerate them, you get the face of a stereotypical space alien. What the significance of this could be I don’t no, but it is intriguing that time and again people who claim to have seen a “Grey” render a drawing that looks like a human face drawn by someone who draws particularly childishly.

14

Originally posted by Green Bean

I did a quick look in the mirror and my middle finger extends approximatley 1 inch above my eye brows. I am probably not a good test subject becuase my hands are 8 and 1/2 inches from base to tip of the middle finger.

15

The ability to draw progresses from simply being able to make a mark on paper to lines to circles and then to the beginnings of stick figures.

From the beginning, kids draw what is important to them. They have that circle figured out, so then they add eyes and a mouth. Limbs come next, and for a while they’re drawn sprouting out of the head. After limbs come the torso, and the limbs are attached in the appropriate places. Hair usually starts appearing about this time as well. After the torso, the belly button. Boy, belly buttons are REALLY important for a while. Once a child has mastered the belly button, they start including hands, and later, feet.

Hands and feet start off as lopsided ovals. After a while, fingers get drawn just as marks coming out of the oval. Number isn’t quite important at this point, and you can get kids drawing two or three or sometimes twelve fingers on one hand. Then the child makes “fat” fingers by drawing them as elongated "U"s coming off the hand. Once the artist gets to this point, they usually start drawing limbs as elongated ovals as well. Ears show up about now as well. Noses come very, very late, if ever.

Kids’ art is incredibly symbolic. They draw the stuff that matters. Size of people indicates they’re importance and a little bit of perception. Give a kid a piece of paper, ask him or her to draw their family, and they’ll start with themself - usually about 1/3 to 1/2 the heighth of the paper. Older siblings are a little bigger, younger siblings are smaller (not in realistic proportions, usually they look pretty similar in form). Moms are noticeably larger, and Dads are just huge.

Getting more specifically North American, ask a child to draw a house, and you’ll get an A frame dwelling with front door in the middle, windows on either side, a chimney above the roof, and a tree in the yard. An ambitious artist will add a doorknob, curtains, smoke for the chimney, apples to the tree, M birds in the sky, and daisies or tulips for flowers. Front doors, if they have color, are always red. The sun is almost always in the upper right corner. Sometimes the sky is just a blue line at the top of the page, but pretty soon, it’s everything above the grass line.

The archetype is incredibly consistent.

As children develop psychologically, they face challenges in their drawings. Transparency occurs when they try to draw overlapping objects (person in car, child holding hot dog), but haven’t figured out how. So, they draw both things, one on top of the other. Perspective is non-existant, and the picture plane gets more distorted than Cezanne or Picasso ever dreamt of as the child tries to fit in everything he or she deems important.

Pretty much, all of these changes tie into Piaget’s stages of psychological development, growth in perception, and ability to master symbolic and abstract thinking. Unfortunately, there comes a time (usually in late elementary school) where children’s drawing ability cannot keep up with their psychological development. Unable to accurately draw what they perceive, most kids give up drawing what matters to them and stick to copying cartoons and other things they feel comfortable with.

[sub]Um . . . can you tell I’m an art teacher?[/sub]

16

That’s what I’ve always believed. That they percieve the face and the head as the complete, with hair at ‘the top’ shown sticking up out of the head, or curly around it, rather than overlapping or hanging over the forehead like it really does.

Another thing kids seem to love drawing are buttons down the front of the body.