Children’s Drawing And Its Stages

Children’s drawing, in addition to being a recreational activity, is one of the ways in which children can translate reality into a sheet or other type of support, expressing their imagination or their particular vision of the world in which they live: their constructions of how the world is.

The relationship between the child’s mental images and their drawings is very close. While mental images are internalized imitations, drawing is an externalized imitation. Thus, in many cases, investigating the qualitative development of children’s drawing allows us to understand, with certain reservations, the child’s symbolic capacity.

Children’s drawing steps

In this article, we’ll talk about Luquet’s various studies on the stages of children’s drawing. In them, he began by establishing that the main characteristic of children’s drawings is that they are realistic.  Children are more focused on drawing the characteristics of reality than aspects related to artistic beauty. The steps by which children’s drawing evolves are: (a) casual realism, (b) frustrated realism, (c) intellectual realism, and (d) visual realism.

casual realism

Drawing begins by being an extension of the motor activity that is captured on a support. That’s why the child’s first productions will be what we know as scribbles. The scribbles are, then, traces left by the child from his first investigations about his movements. They provide the basis for the following steps.

Soon, children start to find similarities between their drawings and reality, or even try to translate it, even if they don’t have enough capacity to do so. If you ask what they are drawing, they may not say anything at first, but as soon as they find a certain analogy between the drawing and reality, they will consider it as a representation of reality.

This step is called casual realism, as the representation of reality comes after or while the drawing is being made. There is no prior intention to draw a concrete aspect of reality. The resemblance is casual or unintentional, but the child welcomes it with enthusiasm and sometimes even, once the analogy is seen, tries to improve the drawing.

frustrated realism

The child tries to draw something specific, but his intention is frustrated due to certain obstacles and he doesn’t get the desired result. The main one is the motor control, which has not yet developed enough precision for the requirement of its designs. Another problem is the discontinued and limited nature of child care; by not paying enough attention, certain details that the drawing must have are ignored.

According to Luquet, the most important aspect of this stage is the “synthetic incapacity”. This is the child’s difficulty in organizing, arranging and guiding the different elements of the drawing. When drawing, the relationship between the elements is very important, since your organization is the one that configures the drawing. However, children at this stage have problems with this. For example, it may happen that when drawing faces, the mouth is above the eyes.

intellectual realism

Once the obstacles of the previous stage and the “synthetic incapacity” have been overcome, nothing prevents the child’s drawing from being completely realistic. But a curious aspect is that child realism does not resemble adult realism. The child does not translate reality as he sees it, but as he knows it to be. We are facing an intellectual realism.

It is possibly the stage that best represents children’s drawings and the most interesting when it comes to researching and studying. Throughout this step, we will see two essential characteristics presented by the child’s drawings: “transparency” and “displacement”.

When we speak of “transparency”, we mean that the child draws the things that are hidden, making transparent what obscures them. For example, draw a chicken inside an egg or feet inside shoes. The other process, the “displacement”, consists in the projection of the object on the ground, ignoring the perspective; an example is to draw the facade of a house vertically and the interior of the rooms seen from above.

These two characteristics show us how visual factors are not relevant when expressing designs. Instead, the child fixates on his mental representation and tries to represent what he knows in what he wants to draw. And that’s why “errors” appear, like the transparency of opaque things or the little importance given to maintaining perspective.

visual realism

From the age of eight or nine, a drawing close to the adult appears, in which  the child draws reality as he sees it. To do this, the child follows two rules: perspective and adhering to the visual model. The characteristics of intellectual realism completely disappear: eliminating non-visible objects, adopting a unique perspective and maintaining the proportion of dimensions. That is, the child adopts a visual realism.

Therefore, children’s drawings lose the characteristic that defined them. Furthermore, many of the children begin to lose interest in drawing because they begin to feel that their skill does not allow them to make drawings that are close to reality.

As a conclusion, it is interesting to mention that, although we can establish a design development in stages, we must be cautious. Since this development is not as linear as we can imagine, we will find advances and setbacks through different phases. Thus, faced with a more difficult task, the child may adopt the strategy from an earlier stage.