This book places child art within the broader context of children's creative intelligence and intrinsic motivation to invent a pictorial world. It examines the development of drawing and painting from several currently dominant theoretical perspectives. This is followed by an extensive examination of empirical data on the art work of children who are ordinary, talented, emotionally disturbed, and atypically developed due to mental disability or autism.

The Child's Creation of a Pictorial World uses a developmental framework that combines theoretical sophistication with rigorous empirical investigations into the mental processes that underlie the child's drawings. It delineates the evolution of forms, the pictorial differentiation of figures and their spatial relations, the role of color in narrative descriptions, and its expressive function. Artistic development across all these dimensions is seen as a meaningful mental activity that serves cognitive, affective, and aesthetic functions.