Art students who cannot draw: exploring the role of personality, dyslexia, perceptual problems, visual memory and drawing skills.

Some art students are unable to draw well and there is a suggestion that this relates to the high rate of dyslexia in art schools. In the first (questionnaire) stage of this
study we used an assessed self-perceived drawing ability in 277 art students, along with measures of a history of dyslexia, a self-administered spelling test, and personality and educational variables. In the second (experimental) stage, 38 art students, stratified by self-rated drawing ability and spelling ability, and 30 controls, carried out drawing tests. Self-perceived poor drawing art students did indeed draw less well than good drawers, but nevertheless were better than controls. Drawing ability was not related to dyslexia or spelling ability. Higher drawing ability did though relate both to being male and to being masculine, and to conscientiousness (particularly Achievement Striving). The 'house' task
of Cain (1943) and the Rey-Osterrieth complex figure suggested that poor drawers are less able accurately to copy angles and proportions, and have poorer visual memory at immediate and delayed recall. We found no evidence to support the recent claim of Cohen and Jones (2008) that "the major source of drawing errors lies in the initial perception of the to-be-drawn object".