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

A blank sheet of paper.

A single instruction: draw an animal.

Whichever one you want.

That’s how a technique published in 1958 begins, one that’s still used today in clinical assessment of children.

Who Levy was, and why an animal

Sidney Levy, a psychologist.

His technique: the Levy Animal-Drawing-Story Technique. Abbreviated: LADS.

The original instruction, verbatim: “Please draw an animal. Any animal you like.”

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

Why an animal, instead of a person directly?

The core idea: drawing an animal would allow more emotional distance.

Less conscious censorship. More unconscious content rising to the surface.

The classic interpretive system

Levy and those who continued his work classified the drawing along three axes:

• Type of animal. Domestic or wild.
• Aggressiveness. Aggressive or non-aggressive.
• Tone. Contemptuous or neutral.

To this were added the so-called expressive aspects, defined by Emanuel Hammer in 1958:

• Placement (where the drawing sits on the page).
• Size.
• Perspective (facing forward, from behind, from above).
• Stroke pressure.
• Shading.
• Erasing.

Six graphic variables, each with its own classic reading.

What makes this test different: there’s real data

Most of the drawing tests on this site only have theoretical reviews or general critiques.

This one has something more: a real study with concrete data.

2020. Spain. 149 children ages 6 to 11, in a clinical study.

Three groups compared:

• Internationally adopted children.
• Children with no adoption, the same age.
• Children in psychological treatment.

All three took the same test, under the same protocol.

The goal: to see whether Levy and Hammer’s classic indicators actually distinguished between these 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 = 0.37)
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 nine indicators showed a real difference in the expected direction.

Six showed no difference at all.

One showed a real difference, but opposite to the prediction.

The most striking finding: size

83% of children in psychological treatment drew a small animal.

Compared with 59% of the adopted group.

And 49% of the group with neither adoption nor treatment.

A statistically real difference (F = 7.29; p = 0.001).

Of the nine indicators, it’s the one that comes closest to what Levy predicted.

Shading: the strongest difference in the whole study

33% of the group in psychological treatment shaded their drawing.

14% of the non-adopted group.

9% of the adopted group.

It’s the sharpest difference in the entire analysis (F = 33.87; p < 0.001).

Important: this doesn’t prove that shading “causes” anxiety, or that shading is diagnostic for any one person.

It proves that, in this specific sample, shading showed up more often in the group that already had identified difficulties.

The unexpected twist: erasing

Here’s the study’s most interesting finding.

Classic logic says: more erasing, more anxiety.

The data say something else:

• Group with neither adoption nor treatment: 42% erased something.
• Group in psychological treatment: 33% erased something.
• Adopted group: only 11% erased something.

The group with no identified problem was the one that erased the most.

A real difference (F = 17.71; p < 0.001). But in the opposite direction from what classic theory predicts.

This connects to something already known about shading in other drawing techniques: these are signs that have been used to explain both the presence of a problem and its absence. That makes them hard to test seriously.

What showed no difference at all

Three central indicators from Levy’s original system didn’t distinguish between groups at all:

• Type of animal. Domestic animals appeared at almost identical rates: 43% to 56% depending on the group.
• Aggressiveness. Between 79% and 82% of every group drew a non-aggressive animal, with no differences.
• Perspective. Drawing from behind or from above was equally rare (or common) across all three groups.

These are, precisely, the most “symbolic” indicators in Levy’s original system.

The more graphic, quantifiable ones (size, shading) did show something.

How our test works

We measure 9 indicators from this tradition:

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

Next to each one, we show what the method claimed and what the real 2020 study found, hiding neither, including the results that contradict the original theory.

One note, as with the rest of this site: a stroke made with a mouse never reproduces the real pressure of a pencil on paper. It measures magnitudes, not fine motor skill.

One nuance worth making explicit: the 2020 study was done with children referred for psychological treatment or going through adoption, assessed by professionals in a clinical setting. Our test is an informational tool meant for an adult to explore this tradition out of curiosity, not a screening or psychological assessment instrument for children or teenagers. If you’re concerned about a child’s or teenager’s emotional wellbeing, the right move is to consult a child psychology professional, not to interpret a drawing using this guide.

If you want to see these 9 indicators applied to your own drawing, you can take the Draw-an-Animal Test.

If you’d rather have a version with three drawings instead of one, Buck’s House-Tree-Person Test starts from the same projection idea applied to different objects.

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. B. (1958). Normative data, frequencies, and symbolism in the drawing of an animal, based on a sample of 7,346 drawings, cited in Ballús et al. (2020).
• Hammer, E. F. (1958). The Clinical Application of Projective Drawings. Charles C Thomas.
• Maganto Mateo, C. (1990). Test Gráfico del Dibujo de un Animal. TEA Ediciones.
• 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.