From “learning to draw” to “acquiring a visual vocabulary”
Many people feel they “can’t draw”, which seems odd given assumptions about drawing as a direct pathway to visual concepts. Most of us can see, so why can’t we draw? […]
New paper: Visual narrative comprehension: Universal or not?
My latest paper has now been published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review entitled “Visual Narrative Comprehension: Universal or not?” This paper explores to what degree sequences of images are universally […]
New paper: Visual narratives and the Mind
My latest paper, “Visual narratives and the mind: Comprehension, cognition, and learning” is published in the collection Psychology of Learning and Motivation. This paper integrates a few threads of research […]
Workshop: How We Make and Understand Drawings
A few weeks back I had the pleasure of doing a workshop with Gabriel Greenberg (UCLA) about the understanding of drawings and visual narratives at the University of Connecticut. The workshop […]
Travel plans and Mailbag
I leave for my upcoming Germany trip on Monday! I’m very excited about the workshops and can’t wait to jump into them. As it turns out, I’ve been invited to […]
New article: Framing “I can’t draw”
I’m happy to say that I have a new article (pdf) published in the journal Culture & Psychology! This one continues with my theories about how people learn how to […]
Commander Mark and visual vocabularies
I got a blast from the past today when my old friend and awesome comic artist Dan Fraga posted this video of “Commander” Mark Kistler’s classic drawing show from PBS, […]
Universality and diversity in visual languages
One of the interesting byproducts of my theory of visual language is the implication that drawings are not universal. Because images look like what they represent (the are “iconic), they […]
New Article: Explaining “I can’t draw”
I’m happy to say that I have a new article published in the journal Human Development that argues that learning how to draw is similar to learning how to speak. […]
Development of drawing abilities
The book Making Sense of Children’s Drawings by John Willats puts forth a compelling theory of how kids learn to draw, and the course of that development. To Willats, drawings link up […]