Concerning Education in the Recognition and Expression of Solids

摘要

For art students, the important mode of expression is drawing. In the same way as the use of language, drawing is important for expressing oneself and communicating with others. However, in recent years in Japan the ability of students to express solids tend to be declining. In this study I gave a questionnaire to freshman students at Joshibi University of Art and Design, in order to investigate how these students had learned methods of spatial representation up until the end of high school, and how in reality they express solids. As far as previous education is concerned, most of the students were not taught, or does not remember the terminology or methods of expressing solids, both of which should have been studied at school. Nevertheless, it did emerge that they had been taught perspective projection. The results showed that many of the students drew pictures using perspective projection when they wanted to express space. However, when they drew rectangular parallelepipeds many of the pictures were drawn with axonometric projection. This appears to be because students' understanding of perspective projection is very vague. At art universities it is therefore necessary to tailor education in graphic representation according to the particular situation.