C. Children’s Drawings: a Bibliography

This is an article in the series “Drawing as it develops“, which includes a study of my daughter Amie’s drawings from 16 months onwards (this is the first article), as well as Some Theory,  and Tips for teaching drawing to a very young child.

For the academics and obssessive perfectionists amongst us, here’s a bibliography of journal articles and books about the development of children’s drawings.

I will add to this list as I find more titles. I might even annotate it, some day…

  • R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: a Psychology of the Creative Eye, 1956.
  • M.D. Barrett and P.H. Light, “Symbolism and intellectual realism in children’s drawings” in British Journal of Educational Psychology, 1976, no. 46, pp. 189-202.
  • Cox, Maureen, Children’s Drawings of the Human Figure – the chapter “The Tadpole Figure” is available via Google Book Search.
  • Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, 1979.
  • L. Fenson, “The transition from construction to sketching in children’s drawings” in N.H. Freeman and M.V. Cox, eds., Visual Order, 1985.
  • Norman Freeman, “Do children draw men with arms coming out of their head?” in Nature, 1975, no. 254, pp.416-17.
  • Norman Freeman, Strategies of Representation in Young Children: Analysis of Spatial Skills and Drawing Processes, 1980
  • Norman Freeman, “Current problems in the devleopment of representational picture-production” in Archives de Psychologie, 1987, no.55, pp. 127-152.
  • Norman Freeman, “Children’s Drawings of humans” in R.L. Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind, 1988.
  • Norman Freeman and M.V. Cox, eds., Visual Order: The Nature and Development of Pictorial Representation, 1985.
  • J.J. Goodnow, Children’s Drawing, 1977.
  • A.M.J. Silk and G.V. Thomas, “Development and differentiation in children’s figure drawings” in British Journal of Psychology, 1986, no. 77, pp. 399-410.
  • A.M.J. Silk and G.V. Thomas, “The Development of size scaling in children’s figure drawings” in British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1988, no. 6, pp. 285-299.
  • Thomas and Silk 1986,1988, 1990
  • Thomas and Tsalimi 1988

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