Why Do Children Draw People Without Bodies

This is an commodity in the serial "Drawing as it develops", which includes a sequence of my daughter Amie's drawings from xvi months onwards, as well as Tips for educational activity cartoon to a very young kid and a growing bibliography.

In her book The Kid as Thinker. The Development and Acquisition of Cognition in Childhood, Sara Meadows (University of Bristol) includes a handy review of the theories about children'due south drawings. This is a brief summary of that text, along with references to some other research, and some remarks of my own.

• First scribbles: motor-impulse shape-making

Children purposefully beginning making scribbles in the 2d yr of life. This act is described by the lovely word "shapemaking". The kid is very interested in this shapemaking, and makes it more than elaborate and deliberate as her motor-command improves: she starts to vary her lines , dots, circles, zigzags and places them more systematically.

See, for instance, the divergence between Amie's drawings at 16 months and at 18 months.

Still, however "shapely" and deliberate, the scientific community agrees on the idea that it is probably not a representational act driven by representational intentions. Instead, information technology is the consequence of a "motor impulse" (Arnheim). If very immature children assert that they drew some thing, information technology almost likely a post hoc and opportunist interpretation: something they drew happens to look like an airplane, a rabbit.

Meet, for case, Amie'due south short fling with cartoon airplanes and naming them, and my difficulty with labeling it as "representational".

• Conventional drawing and "mistakes" in realism: tadpole humans

Once children practise become aware of the representational possibility, their drawing skills may not be up to the task of achieving a realistic enough image (to adult eyes, at least). Their "mistakes" are feature, that is, repeated by the majority of children. The most famous example is the "polliwog" figure, studied in the eighties by Norman Freeman (come across Bibliography).

Amie's tadpoles at age two years 5 months (cf. blog entry)

The tadpole-man figure is one of the child'due south start steps in conventional (read realistic) cartoon. Freeman establish that all children represent the human figure by a typical formula: that of a tadpole. Information technology is the ubiquitous circle with some facial features representing the head as well as the trunk, and dangling lines for legs and, if any, arms.

The AAA Lab at Stanford has a neat, illustrated roundup of the stages of tadpole drawings, from "pre-polliwog" to "tadpole" to "transitional" to "conventional".

• Symbolism, not realism

The realism of these drawings may be insufficient in the eyes of the adult, merely what nearly the child: perhaps she intends these drawings to be representational, yes, just not realistic?

This has been suggested by other researchers (Barrett and Light), who hypothesized that such formulaic drawings may be symbols, rather than attempts at realistic representation. Only like our traffic sign for a playground is symbolic (for the semioticians among you: more precisely iconic).

Not quite tadpoles, merely not quite realistic either…

This view takes the realistic onus off children a lilliputian chip longer. Also, as far equally I know (Amie isn't there withal), children of that age are always in a hurry, and it makes sense that they want to put down quick but effective short-hand representations instead of meticulously realistic depictions.

And this symbolic approach pervades our cuture. In that respect Meadows comments that even young children's drawings are influenced by the culture'due south conventional representations. She mentions the square houses with the key door and the four square windows, the gabled roof and chimney, drawn past children and most adults whose houses don't even remotely look like that. It makes sense that children would selection upwardly our drawings conventions. How many of us accept sat downwardly with our child and (spontaneously or at their asking) scribbled a smiley face (did y'all forget the eyebrows?) or the iconic cat?

• The child'south body-epitome: do nosotros look like tadpoles?

Simply, again, it depends on what you lot believe to be "realistic". To the eye and the mind of the kid, this may be realistic enough. So practise children actually come across humans equally tadpoles?

It's not that uncomplicated. Researchers believe that the polliwog represents the child's body image. Interestingly, i's trunk epitome includes not but the visual shape of your torso as your eyes see it, simply also the mental image and even the feeling of it.

As for the kid'due south visual perception of her body, the Researchers at the AAA Lab betoken out that when children (or adults for that matter) look down at their own bodies, they encounter their arms coming out of their head. So that'south what they draw. And

because children digest their surroundings to what they see and know nigh themselves, they will draw all humans and animals in this tadpole style. This implies that children are more perceptually driven in their drawings from the way they encounter themselves and not from the mode they run into their environment. As they slowly adjust what they see in their surroundings to what they know virtually themselves, this perception will alter.

Two tests of this hypothesis are

1. that children first become better at drawing animals – which they see and regard as quite different from themselves – than at drawing humans
2. that they start to get ameliorate at drawing other humans before they become ameliorate at cartoon their own bodies

• What is "distorted"?

Concluding, nonetheless, that the kid has a "distorted" body-epitome would exist wrong, writes Freeman. Non considering in that location is no distortion (there about certainly is, if yous're a stickler for realism). Rather, the distortion stems from the child's inadequate tools for drawing.

1. She gets distracted, doesn't have piece of cake access to her mental image.
2. She is even physically not up to the job, her motor-command is not fine enough yet and inexperienced.
3. She does non yet master the complexity of planning, positioning and aligning all the elements of the figure.
4. Her "vocabulary" of forms is express to circles, long and short lines, some curves and corners.
5. She has problems with occlusion (when a closer object partially hides an object farther away), scaling, depth and perspective.
6. She tin't yet grapple with decisions of how to "break up" an prototype to begin with: why for instance segment a limb at these joints (shoulder, elbow) and not those (wrist, finger joints)? Is it best outset to "outline" a figure, or to begin with segments which then get put together? Where to begin?

• The child proceeds to draw

It has been pointed out that children oft start nearly the acme of the newspaper and move down from left to correct.

This may explain why virtually children starting time their drawings of people with the head. Tadpoles are serially put down on newspaper in this order:

1. caput and facial features, with more importance given to eyes and mouth than to the olfactory organ
2. legs
3. arms (if whatsoever)
4. in later stages, when a body is drawn every bit well, the arms go onto the larger part, which could be the head or the body

Freeman also constitute a trend to something chosen "finish-anchoring" in children'due south cartoon. The last items they draw are often recalled and dealt with ameliorate, and more than clearly placed, than intermediate items in the serial. Thus children focus on the head kickoff and then on the legs, and give less attention to the trunk and the arms, or they skip these altogether.

But because they are putting down every element sequentially, without sufficiently planning ahead, children oftentimes run out of space. Then the final chemical element gets squeezed and distorted.

• Interpretation, experience and the function of education

Drawing gets better with feel, we all know that. The child is inexperienced, to say the least. She has less motor-control, less tools, a smaller assortment of shapes, etc. Information technology is now mostly accustomed that inadequacies in children's drawings are the results of these rather than of conceptual limitations. Here teaching tin can help.

But educators need to exist conscientious about what and how they teach.

The child may just prefer to exercise a item kind of drawing. And, as with all representation – whether in fine art or science – her decision to draw this and to exit out the other is influenced by her knowledge of the object and her interpretation of what most it is important.

The kid's drawings are representations of how she sees the world and herself (the apply of drawings in child psychotherapy and psychiatry are well accepted). It would exist a pity to bury and finally even suppress this information by pushing developed, conventional intepretations, standards of realism, and even the expectations of realism.

• More than on the polliwog figure in Children's Drawings of the Human Figure by Maureen V. Cox – some parts of the relevant chapter are available via Google Book Search.

• Comments? You can leave them here.

UPDATE: Desire to see Amie's tadpoles, which she started drawing at two years and 4 months?

• [blog entry] Amie's First Tadpole Drawings: Amie at 2 years 4 months
• [blog entry] Tadpoles' Mouths Move Outside Face: Amie at 2 years 5 months
• [web log entry] Tadpoles Also Have Hands and Feet: Amie at two years 5 months
• [blog entry] The Stop of the Tapoles?: Amie at 2 years and 5 months

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Source: https://blog.bolandbol.com/drawing-as-it-develops/children-drawing-theory/

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