There is a growing body of research that has examined cultural variations in drawing and therefore cultural influences on children’s drawing development. Researchers tackle the difficult business of teasing apart broader cultural impact from educational influences on children’s drawing development. Jolley (2010) provides an excellent review of specific environmental and social influences on children’s drawings.
Adi-Japha, E., Berberich-Artzi, J. & Libnawi, A. (2010). Cognitive flexibility in the drawings of bilingual children. Child Development, 81 (5), 1356 – 1366.
Aronsson, K. & Andersson, S. (1996). Social scaling in children's drawings of classroom life: A cultural comparative analysis of social scaling in Africa and Sweden. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 14 (3), 301-314.
Aronsson, K. & Junge, B. (2000). Intellectual Realism and Social Scaling in Children’s Art: Some Critical Reflections on the Basis of Ethiopian Children’s Drawings. In Lindstrom, L. (Ed.) The cultural context. Comparative studies of art education and children’s drawings, 135-159. Stockholm: HLS Forlag.
Boyatzis, C. J., & Albertini, G. (2000). A naturalistic observation of children drawing: Peer collaboration processes and influences in children’s drawing. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 90, 31–48.
Burkitt, E., Tala, K. & Low, J. (2007). Finnish and English children’s color use to depict affectively characterised figures. International Journal of Behavioural Development, 31 (1), 59-64.
Colom, R., Flores-Mendoza, C. E., & Abad, F. J. (2007). Generational changes on the draw-a-man test: a comparison of Brazilian urban and rural children tested in 1930, 2002 and 2004. Journal of Biosocial Science, 39, 79-89.
Cox, M. V., Koyasu, J., Hiranuma, M., & Perara, J. (2001). Children’s human figure drawings in the UK and Japan: The effects of age, sex and culture. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 19, 275 – 292.
Golomb, C. (1973). Children's representation of the human figure: The effects of models, media and instructions. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 87, 197-251.
Haanstra, F., Hoorn, M. V., & Damen, M. L. (2011). The U-curve going Dutch: Cultural differences in judgements of artwork from different age and expertise groups. International Journal of Education Through Art, 7 (2), 153-169.
Jolley, R.P. (2010). Children and Pictures: drawing and understanding. Wiley-Blackwell.
Karniol, R. (2011). The color of children’s gender stereotypes. Sex roles, 65 (1), 119-132.
Kindler, A. M., & Darras, B. (1998). Culture and development of pictorial repertoires. Studies in Art Education, 39 (2), 147-167.
Martlew, M. & Connolly, K. (1996). Human Figure Drawings by Schooled and Unschooled Children in Papua New Guinea. Child Development, 67, 2743-2762.
Nelson, T. M., Allan, D. K. & Nelson, J. (1971). Cultural Differences in the use of color in NorthWest Canada. International Journal of Psychology, 6, 283-292.
Pariser, D., Kindler, A., van den Berg, A., Dias, B., Liu, W. C., & Diaz, B. (2007). Does practice make perfect? Children's and adults' constructions of graphic merit and development: A crosscultural study. Visual Arts Research, 33 (2), 96-114.
Pariser, D., & Berg, A. V. D. (2001). Teaching art versus teaching taste: What art teachers can learn from looking at a cross-cultural evaluation of children's art. Poetics, 29 (6), 331-350.
Pinto, G., Bombi, A. S., Cordioli, A. (1997). Similarity of friends in three countries: A study of children’s drawings. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 20, 453-469.
Pinto, G., Gamannossi, B. A., & Cameron, C. A. (2011). From scribbles to meanings: social interaction in different cultures and the emergence of young children’s early drawing. Early Child Development and Care, 181 (4), 425-444.
Rubeling, H., Keller, H., Yovsi, R., Lenk, M., Schwarzer, S. & Kuhne, N. (2011). Children’s Drawings of the Self as an Expression of Cultural Conceptions of the Self. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42, 406-424.
Vélez van Meerbeke, A., Saldoval-García, C., Ibáñez, M., Talero Gutiérrez, C., Fiallo, D., & Halliday, K. (2011). Validation Study of Human Figure Drawing Test in a Colombian School Children Population. Spanish Journal of Psychology, 14 (1), 464-477.