What Your Animal Drawing Says, According to Levy's Method (Tested Against Real Data)

A blank sheet of paper and a single instruction: draw an animal, whichever one you want. That’s how a technique published in 1958 begins, one that’s still used in clinical assessment of children.

Who Levy was, and why an animal

Sidney Levy proposed the Levy Animal-Drawing-Story Technique, known by its initials, LADS. The original instruction reads, verbatim:

“Please draw an animal. Any animal you like.”

A second part follows: inventing a story about that animal.

The reason for asking for an animal rather than a person is emotional distance. This tradition holds that projecting onto an animal triggers less conscious censorship than drawing yourself, and that this makes it easier for content that would otherwise stay guarded to surface.

The classic interpretive system

Levy and those who continued his work classified the drawing along three axes: type of animal (domestic or wild), its aggressiveness (aggressive or not), and tone (contemptuous or neutral).

To this were added the expressive aspects Emanuel Hammer defined in 1958 for drawing tests: placement on the page, size, perspective (facing forward, from behind, from above), stroke pressure, shading, and erasing. Each of these six graphic variables has its own classic reading.

What makes this test different: there’s data

Most drawing tests have theoretical reviews or general critiques. The animal drawing also has a recent comparative study with concrete data.

In 2020, Ballús, Barbosa, Sales, and Gómez gave the LADS to 149 children ages 6 to 11 living in Barcelona, split into three groups: 44 internationally adopted children, 57 non-adopted classmates from schools in the city, and 48 children from a clinical group, in psychological treatment. All of them took the test under the same protocol, and the stories were classified following the criteria of Maganto and Maganto (1990).

The goal was to check whether Levy and Hammer’s classic indicators actually distinguished between those groups.

Summary table: what held up and what didn’t

Indicator	The method claimed	Real difference between groups?
Small size	Emotional sign	Yes (p = 0.001)
Shading	Anxiety	Yes, the strongest difference (p < 0.001)
Stroke pressure	Tension or inhibition	No (p = 0.18)
Type of animal (domestic/wild)	Passivity / aggression	No (p = 0.64)
Animal’s aggressiveness	The drawer’s own aggressive impulses	No (p = 0.92)
Contemptuous tone	Self-devaluation	No (p = 0.38)
Perspective (from behind)	Avoidance	No (p = 0.75)
Perspective (from above)	Need for control	No (p = 0.40)
Erasing	More anxiety	Yes, but reversed (p < 0.001)

Two of the nine indicators showed a real difference in the expected direction, six showed none, and one showed a difference opposite to the prediction.

Size and shading

83% of the children in the clinical group drew a small animal, compared with 59% of the adopted group and 49% of the non-adopted group (F = 7.29; p = 0.001). Of the nine indicators, it’s the one that comes closest to what Levy predicted.

Shading produced the sharpest difference in the analysis (F = 33.87; p < 0.001): 33% of the clinical group shaded their drawing, versus 14% of the non-adopted group and 9% of the adopted group.

Neither finding turns the sign into an individual diagnosis. They indicate that, in this sample, small size and shading appeared more often in the group that already had identified difficulties, which is very different from being able to say anything reliable about a specific child from their drawing.

The unexpected twist: erasing

Classic logic says more erasing means more anxiety. The data went another way: 42% of the non-adopted group erased something, 33% of the clinical group, and only 11% of the adopted group (F = 17.71; p < 0.001).

The group with no identified difficulty was the one that erased the most. The difference is real, but in the opposite direction from what the theory predicts.

This connects with what’s already known about erasing in other drawing techniques: it’s a sign that has been given opposite readings, from anxiety and conflict to positive self-criticism, an attempt to improve the drawing (as the study’s own authors note). A sign that admits any interpretation is very hard to put to the test.

What showed no difference

Three central indicators from the original system didn’t distinguish between groups:

• Type of animal. Domestic animals appeared at similar rates in all three groups, between 43% and 56%.
• Aggressiveness. Between 79% and 82% of each group drew a non-aggressive animal.
• Perspective. Drawing from behind or from above was equally rare in all three groups.

These are precisely the most symbolic indicators in the method. The more graphic, quantifiable ones, like size and shading, were the ones that showed something. The pattern matches the general conclusion of Motta, Little, and Tobin (1993) about figure drawings: their symbolic readings don’t reliably assess personality or emotional state.

One limitation of the study itself is worth adding: it compares groups that differ in many things at once (adoption history, reason for referral, environment), and it runs many comparisons on a modest sample. It’s a good starting point, not a validation of the method.

How our test works

Our Draw-an-Animal Test collects 9 indicators from this tradition:

• 4 are measured directly from your stroke: size, placement, pencil thickness, and shading.
• 5 depend on you telling us what you drew: type of animal, aggressiveness, tone, perspective, and whether you erased anything.

Next to each one we show what the method claimed and what the 2020 study found, including the results that contradict the original theory. A stroke made with a mouse doesn’t reproduce the pressure of a pencil on paper, so what gets recorded are magnitudes like size or position.

The study was done with children assessed by professionals in a clinical and adoption context. Our test is an informational tool for an adult to explore this tradition out of curiosity, not a screening or assessment instrument for children or teenagers. When there’s a concern about a child’s emotional wellbeing, the person who can assess it is a child psychology professional, not a guide to interpreting drawings.

The same idea of projection, applied to three objects instead of one, is behind Buck’s House-Tree-Person Test.

Sources

• Ballús, E., Barbosa, P., Sales, A., & Gómez, A. (2020). Adopción y técnicas proyectivas: estudio comparativo con el test del dibujo del animal (LADS). Psicopatología y Salud Mental del Niño y del Adolescente, 35, 69-81.
• Levy, S., & Levy, R. The free animal drawing test. In E. F. Hammer (Ed.) (1958), The Clinical Application of Projective Drawings. Charles C Thomas. Cited via Ballús et al. (2020).
• Hammer, E. F. (1958). The Clinical Application of Projective Drawings. Charles C Thomas.
• Maganto, C., & Maganto, J. M. (1990). T.D.A. Test del dibujo de un animal. Seco Olea.
• Motta, R. W., Little, S. G., & Tobin, M. I. (1993). The use and abuse of human figure drawings. School Psychology Quarterly, 8(3), 162-169.