ABSTRACT
Current accounts of the ways in which children produce drawings are based on one of two models: the camera or the computer. The camera model is a very old one and is assumed by all earlier writers on children’s drawings. In cameras an image is projected onto the film by light rays coming from the scene, and this image is then captured by chemical processes. But the cameras we know today had predecessors, the best known of which is the camera obscura, and optical devices of this kind provided the model for early theories of visual perception.1 Gibson (1971) quoted Sir Isaac Newton’s account:
Against the background of this theory of vision it seemed perfectly natural to writers on children’s drawings to assume that the production of pictures by older children and adults could be explained in terms of the transference of views of scenes in the form of “pictures on the retina” to the surface of the paper. Gibson (1978) summed up the copying theory of pictures in this way: “Drawing is always copying. The copying of a perceptual image is drawing from life. The copying of a stored image is drawing from memory. The copying of an image constructed from other memory images is drawing from imagination” (p. 230). Gibson then went on to ask how copying an image was supposed to occur. As he pointed out, we have no means of projecting an image onto the paper in the way that an image in a camera is projected onto a film, but he observed that traditional theories of drawing tried to overcome this objection by saying, “If you cannot trace around the projected mental image at least you can copy it freehand. Perhaps drawing is not exactly like this, they say, but something like this. Otherwise what could it be?” (pp. 230-231).
