Every day everywhere in the world, young children make a fist around a pencil or crayon...
or drag their fingers in earth or frosty windows, to scribble. After the scribble tells them they can be movers of a line, they quickly build upon their pictorial discoveries in a logical way. Soon they celebrate in drawings themselves, their parents, brothers and sisters, flowers and trees, their dogs and cats, their houses, the birds, the clouds, their experience.
Children draw just as did their ancestors, with orderly growing complexity; spirals, almost perfect circles, circles with lines radiating from them, circles bisected vertically and horizontally, parallel lines which maintain equal distances from each other, rectangles, oblique lines and triangles.
Sylvia Fein – First Drawings, Preface, 1993
“I have been watching my granddaughter, three year old, Calista, in her various artistic endeavors. Her first-ever face (person?) is absolutely on the money as to the time and the way it was put together. Thanks for giving me the information in Heidi’s Horse to be ready for it when it finally appears.”
Frank Wilson, M.D. Author of The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture 1998
“As a fan of both your books, Heidi’s Horse and First Drawings, it was completely fascinating for me when my own daughter, Marcelle, started scribbling some of the same shapes I had seen pictured in your books. I now find myself flipping through them often, as it is so much fun for me to look at the progression of drawing ability and visual thinking development, that you picture and describe in your books. It is great to have a sense of where she is, and what’s to come. Thank you!
Heidi Ezial – 2009