After 5 months of research, I learned how children’s drawings can help us better understand a child mentally, emotionally, and socially. Therapists and psychologists use children’s drawings in order to diagnose mental disorders, understand family relationships and gauge the intelligence of a child.

I wanted to create a project that would show how these drawings can give us clues to the inside of a child’s brain. After brainstorming different mediums, I decided to covey my research in the form of wooden puzzles - because of their playful and childlike attributes. Each of my puzzles represents a different drawing test (the Tree Drawing Test (TDT), Draw a Person Test, and the Kinetic Family Drawing Test (KFD)) that helps us understand a child’s mental, emotional and social disposition. Within each puzzle different concepts are illustrated in the form of a piece of the puzzle.

Since created, these puzzles have been on display in university galleries, and have been selected to be shown in other galleries in the state of Utah. The puzzles intrigue its viewers to look deeper into children’s drawings and see them as more than a page with scribbles.