This complete evidence-based practice paper describes preliminary results on a methodology used in a general first-year engineering program to explore students’ perceptions of engineering through the use of drawings. Data were analyzed using an arts-based open-coding approach. Initial results provide a representation of students preconceptions about the discipline in terms of human, technical, process-based, and holistic/global aspects, which provides further evidence that arts-based methods are effective in capturing student perceptions of the engineering discipline.