The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [41]
By the time children are about three and a half, the imagery of their art becomes more complex, reflecting growing awareness and perceptions of the world. A body is attached to the head, though it may be smaller than the head. Arms may still grow out of the head, but more often they emerge from the body—sometimes from below the waist. Legs are attached to the body.
Fig. 5-3. Scribble drawing by a two-and-a-half-year-old.
Fig. 5-4. Figure-image drawing by a three-and-a-half-year-old.
Children’s repeated images become known to fellow students and teachers, as shown in this wonderful cartoon by Brenda Burbank.
“You must be Billy’s parents. I’d recognize you anywhere!”
By age four, children are keenly aware of details of clothing—buttons and zippers, for example, appear as details of the drawings. Fingers appear at the ends of arms and hands, and toes at the ends of legs and feet. Numbers of fingers and toes vary imaginatively. I have counted as many as thirty-one fingers on one hand and as few as one toe per foot (Figure 5-4).
Although children’s drawings of figures resemble each other in many ways, each child works out through trial and error a favorite image, which becomes refined through repetition. Children draw their special images over and over, memorizing them and adding details as time goes on. These favorite ways to draw various parts of the image eventually become embedded in the memory and are remarkably stable over time (Figure 5-5).
Fig. 5-5. Notice that the features are the same in each figure—including the cat—and that the little hand symbol is also used for the cat’s paws.
Fig. 5-6.
Pictures that tell stories
Around age four or five, children begin to use drawings to tell stories and to work out problems, using small or gross adjustments of the basic forms to express their intended meaning. For example, in Figure 5-6, the young artist has made the arm that holds the umbrella huge in relation to the other arm, because the arm that holds the umbrella is the important point of the drawing.
Using his basic figure symbol, he first drew himself.
He then added his mother, using the same basic figure configuration with adjustments—long hair, a dress.
He then added his father, who was bald and wore glasses.
Another instance of using drawing to portray feelings is a family portrait, drawn by a shy five-year-old whose every waking moment apparently was dominated by his older sister.
Even Picasso could hardly have expressed a feeling with greater power than that. Once the feeling was drawn, giving form to formless emotions, the child who drew the family portrait may have been better able to cope with his overwhelming sister.
The landscape
By around age five or six, children have developed a set of symbols to create a landscape. Again, by a process of trial and error, children usually settle on a single version of a symbolic landscape, which is endlessly repeated. Perhaps you can remember the landscape you drew around age five or six.
What were the components of that landscape? First, the ground and sky. Thinking symbolically, a child knows that the ground is at the bottom and the sky is at the top. Therefore, the ground is the bottom edge of the paper, and the sky is the top edge, as in Figure 5-7. Children emphasize this point, if they are working with color, by painting a green stripe across the bottom, blue across the top.
Most children’s landscapes contain some version of a house. Try to call up in your mind’s eye an image of the house you drew. Did it have windows? With curtains? And what else? A door? What was on the door? A doorknob, of course, because that’s how you get in. I have never seen an authentic, child-drawn house with