How do children’s visual concepts change across childhood,and how might these changes be reflected in their drawings?Here we investigate developmental changes in children’s abil-ity to emphasize the relevant visual distinctions between objectcategories in their drawings. We collected over 13K drawingsfrom children aged 2-10 years via a free-standing drawing sta-tion in a children’s museum. We hypothesized that older chil-dren would produce more recognizable drawings, and that thisgain in recognizability would not be entirely explained by con-current development in visuomotor control. To measure recog-nizability, we applied a pretrained deep convolutional neuralnetwork model to extract a high-level feature representation ofall drawings, and then trained a multi-way linear classifier onthese features. To measure visuomotor control, we developedan automated procedure to measure their ability to accuratelytrace complex shapes. We found consistent gains in the recog-nizability of drawings across ages that were not fully explainedby children’s ability to accurately trace complex shapes. Fur-thermore, these gains were accompanied by an increase in howdistinct different object categories were in feature space. Over-all, these results demonstrate that children’s drawings includemore distinctive visual features as they grow older.