The studies of Jones and Stanton on repetitive drawings demonstrated that once children have developed a strategy of representation, they tend to retain it in subsequent drawings even after they have been provided with additional data about the objects they are depicting, data that would normally affect their mode of attack quite fundamentally had not graphic strategy already been developed in their minds or put into action. These experiments provide a model for the emergence of relatively stable individual graphic versions of objects by children and at the same time help to explain why children's drawings are often not as sophisticated as their knowledge. The logic is that children tend to lose their flexibility in portraying things in the very act of generating early versions of them. That is not to say that children's drawings never change, but rather that their drawings often evolve by the modulation or amendment of existing devices, rather than through a revolutionary rethinking of the basic representational strategy.

Where do innovations occur in drawings?

One prediction we can make from this is that when innovations do appear in children's drawings, they will tend to occur not in the initial strokes of the drawings, but late in the sequence. To establish empirically whether this was in fact a fair inference, I undertook to collect a substantial corpus of repeated drawings from a group of primary school children.