[accessibleimage] Re: Blind children drawing people

Yes.  I do find it completely familiar, Amanda.  Ha, some funny mishaps on my 
part with which I won’t tangle up this list.  Write me off-line if you wish.  
But, before you wrote your reasons for not drawing clothes on the figure, I had 
the question (your reason) in my mind.  Then when I read it, it felt like inner 
verdigo sort of.

When I had to study drafting of sorts, I could never for the life of me figure 
out how the tactile representations of three-D objects shown to me could be 
seen as such by the sighted.  Feel the three-D tactile drawing of a ball, a 
barrel, a cookie, a record, a cylinder, and other more complex figures and 
you’ll get the idea.  The drawing of a house looked—that is felt—absolutely 
Nothing like the three-D models of houses which I’ve handled.  The same goeth 
for some animals.  So, I merely memorized the generic shapes so I could 
duplicate various drawings when I had to on the raised kine drawing kit.  I 
varied the parameters, added subfigures together, but could never understand 
them visually.

IN some cases, I could never identify an object as it was drawn, but as soon as 
it was told me to me then limbic recognition flashed forth, like a blaze of 
lightning where before had reighned great darkness.

I’ve known people who lost their sight as adults, and they had no such 
challenges as these.

Charles

From: Amanda Lacy 
Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2012 10:39 PM
To: accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
Subject: [accessibleimage] Re: Blind children drawing people

This brings back some interesting memories. I am blind from birth and found it 
easy to learn to draw sort of stick figures at an early age. Once I drew one in 
my mainstream class and the teacher immediately said, "Amanda, the person is 
upside-down." The head was pointed toward me, and I reasoned that there was 
neither up nor down on that flat paper and that if I lifted the edge closest to 
me so that the figure was standing up, it would be facing my direction and 
right-side-up. No one understood my reasoning.

Interestingly, my second drawing mishap took place at the Texas School for the 
Blind during a summer program. We were required to draw, and so I drew another 
bipedal figure. The staff then asked me to draw clothes on it. I tried to 
explain that this was impossible since the figure was flat and clothes had to 
wrap around a 3D body. Being six or seven years old I was not taken seriously.

Does anyone find any of this familiar?

Amanda

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: cpond 
  To: accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2012 9:14 PM
  Subject: [accessibleimage] Re: Blind children drawing people

  Many blind children (and also adults) cannot conceive drawing a 
three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional medium.  Whether it is a 
neurological, a developmental or comceptual block, this is so for many.  
Three-dimensional visualizing, and more critically here the sense of sight 
being able to “see” in three dimensions must be learned within a narrow windows 
at an early time in the child’s life.  Else it doesn’t seem to take.

  Charles
  From: bmarek 
  Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2012 2:28 PM
  To: accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Subject: [accessibleimage] Re: Blind children drawing people

  It's probably silly to post a question and then to try and answer it but I, 
too, find the question intriguing. I work mainly with school-age children, 
where I am confronted with somewhat different challenges, like the request I 
had from a 10-year old who said: I can understand drawings of people standing 
but not when they are doing something. To help him and other children solve 
this "problem", I developed a resource which I call "Fleximan" but it only 
helps children understand what people look like when they sit, bend down, jump, 
do push-ups or somersaults, kick or throw a ball etc. but does not provide an 
answer to the question about how very young blind children draw people.  My 
feeling is that "tadpoles" may not be an obligatory stage in blind children's 
drawings. Drawing on plastic is much harder than drawing on paper so probably 
blind children do not start drawing as early as sighted kids, and, drawing a 
circle is not easy when you can't see so sth like a rectangle is more likely as 
the main part of a person's body. But I may be wrong

  Boguslaw 'Bob' Marek



  W dniu 29.01.2012 20:16, bmarek napisał(a):

    Below I am copying a message from another list - a question from a friend 
in Australia.

    Boguslaw 'Bob' Marek:

    Hi,
    For a new project I am very interested to find out if you know of research 
or resources giving an insight in the drawing development of young blind 
children and if, like their sighted peers, they go through a period in which 
they draw so-called "tadpole drawings", basically a circle as the head and body 
in one, and then sticks as arms and legs?
    kind regards,
    Phia

    Sonokids Australia
    www.sonokids.org












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