Every sign is a story.

“Every child is an artist. The problem s how to remain an artist once we grow up.” 

Pablo Picasso

Every one of us should open those dusty drawers where we used to save the memories of our childhood. Between report cards, old exercise books and pictures we could find also many drawings, that we forgot about. It sounds strange but watching those drawings could be very useful to know something more about our childhood, even more than exercise books, because every symbol and every sign tell us about a step in our growing up.

The “sign” is the first instrument a child can use to talk about his relationship with the environment around him and the world inside himself.  The first signs, doodles, are experiments. Using doodles  the child knows new expressive instruments and unloads energy in drawing. 

Through doodles, the child educates his hand, learns how to use the pencil and how to coordinate eyes and arms. So, the signs that he draws on the piece of paper don’t have a real intention, but they are traces of the child’s training to build something. It’s an exercise, and so, the doodle is not just a nonsense sign, but it has a brand new specific meaning.

When the child is 2 or 3 years old, he starts to realize the connection between arms and eyes, and the pieces of paper start to be covered of vertical, horizontal and circular lines. This signs are very well aware, controlled by the hand and by the look.  Consciousness is so much increased  that the child knows what is drawing and he is able to judge if it’s well done or not. If he dislike his drawing, he corrects the mistakes covering them with new signs.

In the drawings made when he’s 5 years old, is common to find the human figure. It’s a development of previews signs, like the circle, improved by many new details, hands, and some clothes. 

Little girls use to enrich it with many others things, like pets, flowers, but in most of the drawings, at this age, boys and girls use to draw houses. 

The house is an important element for analyze children’s drawings. Often, children draw the house inside and outside at the same time, and it means that they don’t just draw what they know, but also what is closed emotionally to them.

At this age, the children has improved a lot their way of drawing. They can consciously choose colors, they can be inspired by others images and they start using their imagination. The “man” is evolved too,  it has lost is upright standing position and it starts moving and interacting with other things. This concept of movement makes the child understand others important elements: proportions and composition.

Trying to read children’s drawings can be an interesting psychological experiment. The child, once he got the basic knowledge, has got the freedom of managing the piece of paper as he prefers. We can understand more about who made them, analyzing their pieces of work.  For example, for  what concerns composition,  a very shy child is going to draw on a little portion on a side of the piece of paper, and a very happy and thoughtless one is going to draw all over the space; if the drawing is mall and full of little details, its author must be a very patient, meticulous and careful child; who draws figures upright standing on the ground is a very practical one, and who draws them all over the space without direction is a dreamer drawer.

So, the drawings we made when we were young are not only memories of our childhood, but also witness of who we used to be, and we can find there our dreams, our personality, and the reasons that brought us to who we are now.