Drawings from Gaia, a Blind Girl

Abstract

Gaia, a totally blind girl, was asked to make raised-line drawings. Gaia's vision at best was peripheral. She draws out of interest, and has drawn since preschool with encouragement from her mother. She was asked to draw objects and scenes involving depth from a vantage point, eg a table from below, two cars (one behind the other), and two parallel rows of apples (receding from her, on a table top). Gaia represented space in her drawings using T-junctions for overlap, height in the picture plane, parallel projection, and inverse projection. That is, Gaia uses features of systems common in sighted children's drawings. The development of drawing in blind and sighted children may be similar in good measure because haptics provides access to many of the same spatial principles as vision.