According to Arnheim (1977), the perception of artworks means our total experience in our interaction with them. From this point of view, people can interact with artworks in various ways such as looking, copying, and reading reviews on the artworks. Different ways of interaction with artworks provide different kind of perceptual experiences. In this paper, we focused on the copying of artists' works and proposed the hypothesis that copying encourages the copiers' creativity as well as their acquiring knowledge of the artworks. We presumed that copying has the following two aspects: (1) understanding others and (2) understanding oneself. In the former aspect, the knowledge about the artistic products (to be copied) would be deepened by means of inferring the art making processes. In the latter aspect, the copiers' own taste for expression may become clarified by means of comparisons with others' artworks. Thus, the latter aspect is particularly important for creativity, because it might facilitate the copier's ability to produce her/his own original artworks. Our recent experiment (Ishibashi & Okada, 2003) revealed that copying facilitated students' creativity for drawing. Some of the verbal protocols in the copying session of the experiment indicate that the students participated in these two aspects of copying processes.
