Subjective and Objective Measures of Drawing Accuracy and their Relationship to Perceptual Abilities R Chamberlain, C McManus |
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Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, United Kingdom
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| In 1943 Theron Cain studied art students’ ability to draw a series of simple six-sided shapes, and found this ability to be correlated with formal drawing assessments at art school. This provided evidence that certain aspects of drawing accuracy can be quantified, and that performance on more straightforward drawing tasks can predict drawing accuracy for more complex stimuli, propounding a role for perceptual sensitivities in an account of drawing ability. The current study sought to validate Cain’s findings by assessing the relationship between drawing and reproduction of angles and proportions in a rendering and non-rendering task, and by exploring the validity of shape analysis techniques for measuring drawing accuracy. Cain’s findings were found to be supported; the ability to represent simple angular and proportional relationships relates to higher level drawing ability in both rendering and non-rendering scenarios. Drawing accuracy determined by shape analysis methods was also found to be correlated with subjective accuracy ratings for the same drawings. These findings provide support for both the methodology and the theoretical implications of Cain’s early empirical study into observational drawing accuracy and provide a framework for further investigation into the perceptual abilities underpinning accurate representational drawing. |
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