Jia Xin Chen, Christana Adeyemi, Yokatty Hernandez, Nathalia Betancourth, Keila
Ortiz, Barsha Bajracharya, Karen Rodriquez
Prof. Randolph Schultz
Child Psychology
10-21-14
Children’s Art
Children are constantly developing. We tend to develop more in the first 18 years than the following 50 or 60 years. Children’s drawings is one way to monitor the development of a child. From the ages of 12-18 months, a child will start to express a small amount of creativity on paper. This illustration may not represent anything but as the child gets older the abstraction of the art will start to represent something bigger.
According to E.Cooke there are four stages of drawing throughout a child’s life: scribbling, pre-symbolism, symbolism, and realism.
A variety of factors combine with fine motor control the development of children’s artful representations. These include the realization that pictures can serve as symbols, improved planning along with spatial understanding, and the emphasis that the child’s cultural environment places on art, and artistic expression. In the drawings we have experienced a series of photos drawn from children of the ages 3-10, which have evolved from the processes of scribbles, this usually happens during the second or third year in a child’s life, the intended representation is contained in gestures rather than in the resulting of marks or actual images on the paper. Following that stage is the first representational form, this is when the child actually begins to use lines to represent the boundaries of objects. Finally, children’s drawings begin evolving into more realistic

drawings. Young children do not demand that a drawing be realistic, however as their cognitive and motor skills improve, they learn a desire to fulfill greater realism, in this stage body parts begin to be clearly and more realistically defined. Before constructing our social experiment, we came up with a simple hypothesis that the children will express their illustrations in a quick and simplistic form. While doing this project our group was asked to discuss the development of children by examining their art, so we asked 3-10 year olds to draw their favorite superhero. At first they were hesitant and said things like, “I don’t know how to draw a superhero” or “I don’t know any superheroes” so they drew anything that came to mind. A three year old drew a cop trying to catch a robber which turned into a kidnapper trying to take the girl away. This was surprising because at the age of three she already knew what it meant to be kidnapped. It was also great to see that she understood that cops protect people by catching criminals.
Four and five year old children tend to experiment with the way they draw.
Sometimes, they create unique figures to describe a person, place or thing. Once a child has established a definite symbol for a person, they will repeat it again and again without much variation unless a particular experience causes the child to modify the concepts involved. One of the more noticeable changes that occur in children’s drawings around the age of five and six is that they organize objects in spaces. As time passes, there drawing will no longer be all over the page because they are now aware of the relationships between the objects they create. They are also able to recognize that these objects have a definite place on the ground. By the age of nine or ten, many children

exhibit greater visual awareness of the things around them. As a result, they become attentive to details and proportion in what they are drawing. This typically includes body parts such as legs, arms, fingernails, hairstyles, and joints instead of stick figures.
In this drawing you can see she added some grass on the bottom, a sun, a house, a tree, and some clouds. Even though you cannot tell exactly what everything is you can make an educated guess. In this picture, the girl drew a circle for a face, square or triangle for a body with a smile, nose, and