THE AGE OF SYMBOLISM
By the age of five or six, most children have developed a repertoire of graphic equivalents or symbols for the things in their environment including a house, a tree, a person, and so on. These symbols are highly individualized since they result from children's conceptual understanding rather than observation of the world around them. For example, each child's symbol for a person will be quite different from any other child's as shown in Figures 11 and 12.
Figure 11 & 12: Family portraits
When a normal child makes a connection between image and idea, assigning meaning ot a drawn shape, the shape becomes a symbol. -Al Hurwitz & Michael Day
The symbols that children, five and six years old, draw for a person usually have a clearly differentiated head and trunk with arms and legs placed in the appropriate locations. Details such as clothing, hands, feet, fingers, nose, and teeth may also receive the attention of individual children. As previously mentioned, the omission of details in a child's drawing is no cause for immediate concern. The child may simply neglect to include a certain feature due to its lack of importance in the activity being drawn.
Figure 13: Person schema
Once a child has established a definite symbol (or schema) for a person, it will be repeated again and again without much variation unless a particular experience causes the child to modify the concepts involved (Figure 13). For instance, a child may exaggerate, change or embellish certain parts of a “person” symbol in order to reveal something unique or special about a particular person or activity being depicted. Also, experiences that stimulate children's awareness of the various actions and functions of the human figure will often lead to changes in the way they symbolize a person and to greater flexibility in their future depictions of people. For instance, children at this age particularly enjoy and benefit from motivational topics involving sports and story-telling activities.
Figure 14: A typical “baseline” drawing
INTRODUCTION OF THE BASELINE
One of the more noticeable changes that occur in the drawings of children around the age of five or six involves the introduction of the baseline to organize objects in space (Figure 14). No longer do objects appear to float all over the page as seen in children's earlier attempts at representation. Children are now aware of relationships between the objects that they create and they recognize that these objects have a definite place on the ground.
Figure 15: Multiple baselines
Initially, children will line up people and objects along the bottom edge of the paper. They soon realize, however, that a line drawn across the paper can serve as a ground, a floor, or any base upon which things can rest. Later on, multiple baselines may be drawn with objects lined up on each of them (Figure 15). The inclusion of two or more baselines in a drawing sometimes occurs when a child wishes to portray distance in a drawing. This graphic solution to representing three-dimensional space can also be found in adult art from many cultures and times.
As children's understanding of the world becomes more complex they feel the need to represent spatial relationships more authentically. Accordingly, the baseline eventually disappears in the drawings of older children and the space below the baseline takes on the meaning of a ground plane.
SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS
In addition to the invention of the base line, children come up with a number of other ingenious ways to depict space in their drawings. One of these involves showing events that occur over time within one drawing or a sequence of drawings (Figure 16). These space-and-time representations, as they are called (Lowenfeld, 1975), result from children's growing concern for telling stories and for showing action in their artwork. Interest in creating visual narratives usually starts around the age of five and then grows stronger as children get older (Wilson & Wilson, 1982).
Figure 16: Michael Jordan in action
Another special type of drawing that children begin making around the age of five or six is the x-ray drawing in which an object appears transparent or is “cutaway” so that one can see inside (Figure 17). This type of drawing is typically done whenever the inside of something is of greater importance than the outside. Children often use the X-ray technique to show the inside of their houses, their school, or their family car. Figure 18 shows an insightful x-ray representation by a five-year-old boy of his family and mother whom was pregnant at the time. Note the inclusion of the umbilical cord connecting the baby with its mother. This is an excellent illustration of how children use their active knowledge of a subject when drawing a picture of it.
Figure 18: A family portrait showing an expectant mother
CHILDREN'S ART and CULTURAL INFLUENCES
With all the visual materials available to American children today in the form of photographs, book illustrations, comics, television, movies, and video games, it seems only natural that they will “borrow” from these cultural sources in creating their own artwork (Wilson & Wilson, 1982). Children as young as four may include culturally-derived imagery in their drawings, but the influence of the popular media is most noticeable among older children. Indeed, one will find in the typical fifth-grade classroom a number of aspiring comic-book artists as well as other children with a keen interest in drawing sports heroes, rock stars, fashion figures, airplanes, space vehicles, and sports cars.
Figure 19: A nine-year old drew this action scene pitting several
Disney characters with creatures of his own invention.
While many children simply copy their favorite super heroes and comic-book characters, some also invent their own characters and narrative plots (Figure 19). In doing so, these children frequently turn to television, movies and comic books for models. They draw figures that run, leap, and fly across several frames; zoom-in for a close-up of their heroine; and show perspective and dimensionality in ways that children a generation ago couldn't do. Rather than discourage such creative activity, teachers and parents should take full advantage of children's fascination with popular culture and use it to develop their drawing abilities beyond the most basic level.
The models that children know best are those of the popular media. -Marjorie Wilson
