John Willats

University of Birmingham John Willats (died April 2006)[1] was a psychologist and artist known for his research on pictorial systems of depiction and perspective, which included a taxonomy of the methods of visual projection used by various artists.

[4] He was teaching sculpture and drawing at Walthamstow School of Art when along with Fred Dubery, he published his first book, Drawing Systems[5] Willats was an Honorary Research Fellow at the Polytechnic of East London[6] and was an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Birmingham.

In 2000, Willats completed a sculpture celebrating the millennium in a former hometown of Bradford-on-Avon, England.

The sculpture is a life-sized representation of a mill girl, known as "Millie", that celebrates the town's history.

[11] In Making sense of children's drawings, Willats proposed that children learn drawing in a manner comparable to language learning, by picking up increasingly complex rules of depiction.