Children's Ways / Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter

by James Sully

Fig. 3.[12]

Fig. 4.

Coming now to the mode of representing the face, we find at an early stage the commencement of an attempt to differentiate the features. In drawings of children of three we frequently see that while the eyes are indicated by dots the nose is given as a short vertical line. Similarly when the mouth appears it does so commonly as a horizontal line. We notice that more attention is given to the problem of placing a feature than to that of making a likeness of it. Indeed this first drawing is largely a pointing out or noting down of features without any serious effort to draw them. The representation is a kind of local description rather than a true drawing. Curious differences appear in respect of the completeness of this linear noting or enumerating of features. The nose more particularly appears and disappears in a capricious way in the drawings of the same child.

Fig. 5.

Fig. 6.

Odd differences, reflecting differences of intelligence, show themselves in the management of this diagram of the human face. One child, a Jamaica girl of seven, went so far as to draw the face with only one eye (Fig. 5). Again though, as I have said, a child will try to give a correct local arrangement, for example putting the nose between and below the eyes, he does not always reach accuracy of localisation. Many children habitually set the two eyes far up towards the crown of the head, as in Fig. 6. When the features begin to be represented by something more like a form we find in most cases a curious want of proportion. The eye, for instance, is often greatly exaggerated; so is the mouth, which is sometimes drawn right across the face, as in Fig. 6.

As the drawing progresses we note a kind of evolution of the features. In the case of the eye, for example, we may often trace a gradual development, the dot being displaced by a small circle or ovoid, this last supplemented by a second outer circle, or by an arch or pair of arches. In like manner the mouth, from being a bare symbolic indication, gradually takes on form and likeness. There appears a rude attempt to picture the mouth cavity and to show those interesting accessories, the teeth. The nose, too, tries to look more like a nose by help of various ingenious expedients, as by drawing an angle, a triangle, and a kind of scissors arrangement in which the holders stand for the nostrils (see Fig. 7 (a) and (b); compare above, Fig. 4).