LoveMyDD - some of the older children's drawings on that link above I have literally NEVER seen anything like them at my kids preschools/schools. When you are walking around the classroom there are pretty clear patterns in what kids' techniques are like, some of those example pictures seem like the ones that would make you go "WOW" in a classroom for the given age, not examples of what half the class is doing.
My kids are all very strong in the visual/spatial domain. My husband has prefect relative pitch, his sister has a PhD in Visual Art, his aunt is an exceptional painter. I cannot sing (at 2yrs old my eldest would scream in the car "DON'T SING MUMMY!!!!"), and my drawing is also at the 3-4yr old level on that chart.
My eldest DD is MG (on a good day), significantly 2e (AS, Dyslexic, CAPD, sensory issues). She's been able to sing in tune from 2yrs old, has extremely advanced pitch control for age, jaws would drop at the singing she could produce at 5-6 years old (mostly from favourite old musicals), then she lost interest for years and has just re-started and again when she sings in public it gets noticed. We moved states when she was 7yrs old and her Piano teacher's parting words to me were nothing to with a new piano teacher they were "DO NOT let anyone train that voice before she is 18..." Her drawing is definitely above age level compared to what I see in her classroom, both at her current school and her previous school (and that is held up by her grades not just my impressions looking at what is on the wall). Her skill at line drawing, shading, painting, etc, it's all above average (at the very least). She's had an explosion in her ability to copy or sketch in proportion over the last 6 months, this clearly depends on visual spatial skill. Certainly at the moment her artistic pursuits are more clearly advanced than her academics, but that said, as is common for a 2E kid the other Es are improving as she matures and the (near??) giftedness is finally starting to show through academically too.
My middle child is HG+ and LOVES art and craft, building, etc. She's learning Piano way faster than her older sister (along with all the other academic things she's going to bridge the 4yr gap in age). She does NOT have my eldest child's natural ability for singing, but may develop into a lovely singer yet. She didn't have the early obsession with colouring in and colour, but also seems to be increasingly advanced for age in drawing, I am not sure if that is a sign of her visual spatial skill or actual artistic talent... She was grade skipped 18 months ago and when she started in the new grade it was obvious that her drawing ability was developmentally behind her peers, however I did wonder how much that was skill v. exposure to different ideas/ways of doing things. Sure enough she's closed that gap along with all the other gaps she closed since skipping... Basically at 7 she loves to produce, she's less of a "natural" than her sister but faster at learning new skills. I have no real idea how much of what she can do is a true artistic nature or not, does that make sense?
My youngest is 3. A lot of the time she scribbles, but every now and then she draws people or objects and if you apply the "draw a person test" rules to the level of details she adds to a person (limbs, fingers, eyes with pupils and eyelashes, etc) it's quite advanced. Looks like a dogs breakfast though :-). Her singing is hilariously bad. Her dancing is pretty cute. I think it's way too young to tell...
I would say there is a connection between my children's visual spatial skill and their artistic skills, which is certainly a facet of giftedness.
I have been giving a lot of thought to that recent thread on spatial skills and STEM, the article that was linked further down the thread looks at Spatial skill and various career paths. It has a graph looking at the number of people who are in the top 1% for spatial skills but not the top 3% for Verbal or Math skills and whether they ended up in Visual Arts. I have often wondered about the number of people our family knows who are crazy artists, often in technology arts, who I am sure are gifted and wondered how did they get there exactly? Is it purely that art appealed more than STEM or something else? Are they 2E? That spatial skill article really tweaked my thinking about this group. I now lean away from "Are they all 2E" too, how many of them are more gifted spatially than verbal/math? Their mostly pretty verbal people but often express themselves kind of oddly...
