Drawing is an essential aspect of growing up for children, influencing their mental and physical development. It is through drawing that children learn about the world. As children’s artistic development is the result of the maturation of brain structures, it seems sensible to guide them towards an active form of cognition through direct experience. The human figure is considered one of the most challenging motifs in the creation of art, but it is also one of the most common themes in children’s drawings, as this is what a child has the most direct experience with. It gives a child a great deal of motivation and encouragement to create. As a child observes and attempts to depict a human being, they go through a process of the discovery of the spatio-visual characteristics of the human body, as well as its structure and different parts. A child’s drawing is dependent on the level of spatio-visual development achieved. When depicting the human figure, the level of a child’s development is visible in the way the various parts of the depicted object are constructed into a final image.
In the empirical part of my research, I collected and analysed children’s drawings in order to investigate how children of different pre-school ages encounter the problem of drawing the human figure in various poses and through different performance modifications, and how these types of motifs are approached by teachers in their work. My results showed, that teachers predominantly allow the child’s free decision-making, but when they choose to draw the human figure in a planned way, they most often depict a human being in an upright, standing position. When planning, teachers opt for drawing from memory and drawing from observation at generally similar rates. An analysis of the drawings demonstrated that children are often more successful at drawing after observation than at drawing from memory. Drawings which were made after observation were frequently more anatomically accurate and contained more detail than drawings made from memory. Lastly, older children were more successful than younger children, while girls were more successful than boys.
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