Children’s drawing and its stages

He children’s drawing It is one of the ways that children capture reality, in addition to their imagination or their particular vision of the world. However, it is also a recreational activity for them.

The relationship between the child’s mental images and his 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.

Stages of children’s drawing

In this article we are going to talk about Luquet’s various studies about the stages of children’s drawing. In them he began by establishing that The main characteristic of children’s drawing is that it is realistic.

In fact, children are more focused on drawing the characteristics of reality than in aspects related to artistic beauty. The stages through which children’s drawing evolves are: (a) fortuitous realism, (b) frustrated realism, (c) intellectual realism and (d) visual realism.

1. Fortuitous realism as a stage in children’s drawing

Drawing begins as an extension of motor activity which is captured on a support. For this reason, the child’s first productions will be what we know as scrawl. The scribbles are, then, traces left by the child of his first investigations about his movements. They represent the basis for the following stages.

Children soon begin to find similarity between their drawings and reality, and even try to capture it, even if they lack sufficient skill to do so. If you ask them what they are drawing, they may at first tell you nothing, but As soon as they find a certain analogy between their drawing and reality, they will consider it a representation of it.

This stage is called fortuitous realism, since the representation of reality arises after or while the drawing is being made. There is no prior intention to draw a specific aspect of reality. The resemblance is casual or fortuitous, but the child welcomes it with enthusiasm and sometimes even, once seeing the analogy, tries to improve it.

Frustrated realism

The child tries to draw something precise, but Your intention is frustrated due to certain obstacles and does not achieve the desired result. The main one is motor control, it has not yet developed sufficient precision for the demands of drawing it. Another problem is the discontinuous and limited nature of child care. By not paying enough attention, certain details that the drawing must comply with are overlooked.

According to Luquet, the most important aspect of this stage is the “synthetic disability”. This is the child’s difficulty in organizing, arranging and orienting the different elements of the drawing. When drawing it is very important existing relationship between the elements, since its organization is what 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 disability” have been overcome, nothing prevents children’s drawing from being completely realistic. But a curious aspect is that children’s realism is not similar to adult realism. The child does not capture reality as he sees it, but as he believes it to be. We are facing intellectual realism.

It is possibly the stage that best represents children’s drawing, and the most interesting when it comes to researching and studying. Throughout this stage we are going to see two essential characteristics that the child’s drawings present: “transparency” and “dejection.”

When we talk about “Transparency” we mean that the child draws those things that are hidden, making transparent what makes them opaque. For example, drawing a chicken inside an egg or feet inside sneakers. And the other process, “dejection”, consists of the projection of the object on the ground, ignoring perspective; An example is drawing 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 the drawings. Instead, The child focuses on his mental representation and tries to translate what he knows into what he wants to draw. And that is why “errors” appear, such as the transparency of opaque things or the lack of importance in maintaining perspective.

visual realism

From the age of eight or nine, a drawing close to that of an adult appears, where the child draws reality as he sees it. To do this, the child abides by two rules: perspective and adhering to the visual model.

The characteristics of intellectual realism completely disappear: eliminating non-visible objects, adopting a single perspective and maintaining the proportion of dimensions. That is, the child adopts visual realism.

Because of this, children’s drawings lose that characteristic that defined them. And furthermore, many children begin to lose interest in drawing because they begin to have the feeling that their ability does not allow them to make drawings that are close to reality.

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

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