Abstract: The present study is the further exploration to the developmental process of encoding characteristics through children’s drawings. One hundred and sixty-three children aged from 4- to 7-years participated in the study. The two main tasks were: copy the three and two-dimensional stimuli of the same model. And copy two-dimensional model with different familiarity and different kinds of meaning. The participants were tested individually, and the sequence of the two tasks were assigned randomly. The results indicated that there were three kinds of coding in the children’s drawings. The first is separate coding, that is, the children copy the model through decomposing the components of the model. The second is canonical orientation representation. The third is the children copy the models as their actual visual appearance. Few children use the first coding in four groups. Canonical orientation predominant at the age of 4, and the third coding is predominant after the age of 5. The change of the encoding in children’s drawings is a dynamic developmental process. The familiarity and the meaning of the models influenced children’s encoding

Key words: children’s drawings encoding stereotypic representation semantic