Pariser points to a 1930s account by the Australian anthropologist Charles P. And these destinations can vary across cultures. In recent decades, scholars have found that children’s drawing development can lead toward myriad destinations-including forms of “nonrealistic” depiction like maps, charts, and symbols. Winner once heard about a preschool-age girl who was drawing a “tadpole” human figure when her father asked her about it, she said something along the lines of “I know they don’t look like this, but this is the way I like to draw them.” David Pariser, a professor of art education at Concordia University in Montreal, adds that sometimes children may draw tadpoles simply “because they’re in a hurry and want to do a bunch of them.”
![sketch meaning sketch meaning](https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/artformplatform.com/files/218385/2534-4091-1552076653_c.jpg)
In fact, sometimes children prefer to draw something a certain way even when they know it “should” look different, or even when they’re well able to draw the object more realistically. “They are trying to draw a visual equivalent, something that is readable, something that somebody else will understand,” says Ellen Winner, a psychology professor at Boston College who also works with Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero, a research group that focuses on arts education. Their goal, ultimately, is to create something that’ll make sense to the person they show it to. But that doesn’t mean they don’t understand how these scenes look in the real world, some experts say instead, the child is more concerned about achieving a kind of visual balance between the objects. Take, for example, the way kids tend to scatter objects in awkward places in their drawings they might draw a house on the left corner of the page and then a road that somehow stands above it. While observers tend to agree that there’s a stage at which most children strive for realistic depiction in their drawing, many psychologists argue that at earlier stages of drawing, children aren’t thinking about realism. But today, a growing number of psychologists suggest that it’s a mistake to see any drawing that doesn’t look “real” as inferior or wrong.
![sketch meaning sketch meaning](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZuCPg9VOrCc/maxresdefault.jpg)
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Or, according to later theories, it simply meant she didn’t know how to represent things realistically (even if she did understand how the thing looked in the real world). A drawing with abstractions or quirks? That meant a child didn’t quite understand the object she was trying to depict. They argued that when a child drew something simple-looking, like a human figure in the “tadpole” style-a sort of circular head with arms and legs jutting out of it (and, usually, no torso) that’s common in kids’ drawing-it was because of the child’s misconception of how, say, the human body is organized. Starting in the 20th century, psychologists tended to assume that a kid had reached a high level of drawing development if she could depict something realistically. If the drawing seems angry or dark, they might worry about what it means.īut experts say these responses rely on an outdated understanding of children’s drawing.
![sketch meaning sketch meaning](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/da/d0/8d/dad08d11e959987330a195cea6121e44.jpg)
Observers tend to laugh these sorts of things off as a kid’s erratic artistic process. There was a sideways house (or was it a knife?) a giant tooth resembling candy corn a supposed self-portrait consisting of an oval with some jagged lines in the middle. In either case, a common reaction is to smile and ask, “What’s it supposed to be?”Īfter all, these creations rarely look like anything fully recognizable or “real.” I uncovered a host of idiosyncrasies after asking parents about their kids’ art. Or she might think it’s ridiculous or downright terrifying. A bystander might think the art-or at least the fact of its existence-is cute. High on the list of awkward social interactions is the moment when a dentist or a co-worker shows off her young child’s nonsensical art.