There are four periods of development of children's artistic expression. We distinguish periods of expression by primary and complex symbols and periods of intellectual and visual realism. In this work, emphasis is placed on the period of intellectual and visual realism. Intellectual realism is a period in which students draw situations that are related to their understanding of the environment and are oriented towards the precise presentation of the visual appearance of the elements. In contrast, visual realism is a period in which drawings become more detailed and similar to visual reality because there is progress in the representation of proportion and perspective (Grgurić, Jakubin, 1996). The main task of this work, through the analysis of the drawings of the students of the subject teaching, is to determine which features of intellectual realism appear in the works and use the results to explain why this happens. The aim of this research is to discover and analyze the representation of the characteristics of the period of intellectual realism in the drawings of the students of the course in question. The sample included 82 drawings of students from the 5th to the 8th grade of an elementary school in Osijek. The drawings were collected during four two-hour art classes where the students had the task of drawing the space of their future workplace. The results of the research showed that the characteristics of intellectual realism appear in the upper grades of elementary school, although students of that age group should belong to the period of visual realism. The most represented features of intellectual realism appear in the sixth most, and the least in the seventh grade. In the fifth and eighth grades, an equal percentage of the characteristics of intellectual realism in students' drawings are present. Namely, most students show an increased ability to observe and convey visual elements in their drawings, but their drawings become technically imprecise and content poor. By manipulating elements such as the size of a human figure or object, then by covering, unfolding and transparently depicting the elements and using reverse perspective, vertical perspective and polyperspective, students want to emphasize space, but also its depth, and that is why they use the characteristics of the period of intellectual realism.