The Development of Drawing in Children
A case for the glorious scribble
Our house is usually a mess of scattered papers, pencils and textas. Brightly drawn pictures are stuck to the fridge and the panels of our girls’ bunk beds. During the COVID-19 shutdown period, they wrote letters for their grandparents and lovingly illustrated the writing paper and envelopes. The four-year-old is still completely unselfconscious about her drawing and presents us with portraits featuring many fingered hands, lopsided eyes, and absolutely no sense of perspective. The six-year-old takes more care and considers the proportions of her figures and the appropriateness of the colours she uses. Still, they are full of the joy of childhood expression.
One of my favourite topics, when I was studying to be an art teacher, was the developmental stages of childhood drawing. I was going into secondary school teaching and didn’t have much practical experience with young children at that time, but I still found it fascinating.
According to Lowenfeld, there are five stages of development. Between two and four years, children go through the scribbling stage when their artworks are all about the kinesthetic pleasure of mark-making. Children at this age do not have much fine motor control so they are likely to use a fist grip.
From around four years to six years old, children’s drawing is in the preschematic stage. Drawings start to take recognisable forms. You can see the child’s thought processes. Children will learn the tripod grip during this stage so their mark-making becomes more controlled.
The schematic stage, from around seven to nine years, shows the child starting to show an awareness of space. Shapes and figures are more recognisable than before.
From nine to eleven years of age, children enter the dawning realism stage when they start to look at their art more critically. This is the age when children’s drawings lose their spontaneity…
