Drawing as Play in Children’s Art

Piaget described early childhood scribbling as “pure play”. In his view, drawing reveals how children perceive the outside world and can be understood as the emergence of mental images.

Luquet (1927) examined children’s drawings from the early years and proposed stages of development visible in their pictures. The article summarises them below. The ages are part of this historical model, rather than fixed milestones for every child:

1. Pure scribbling (ages 3–4): Lines are irregular.

2. Interpreted scribbling (ages 4–5): Children assign meanings to their lines, but these interpretations are still changeable and incidental.

3. Failed realism (ages 5–6), in the terminology of this model: Children decide what to draw but cannot yet reliably arrange the parts into a coherent whole.

4. Intellectual realism (ages 6–7): In this stage, which develops after about age five, children draw what they know rather than only what they see.

5. Visual realism (ages 7–8): In the final stage described here, drawings increasingly follow a particular visual viewpoint, around the age of eight.

Thinking has a strong perceptual dimension. Drawing from an early age can therefore play a useful role in visual learning across many subjects.

Using pictorial symbols in drawing may help children later understand other representational systems, such as mathematics and written language.

Turan Vardar
Rekor Sanat – Art Teacher