Stages of Drawing in Young Children: From Scribbles to Pictures

Two researchers come up again and again in writing about how children’s drawing develops. One is the art educator Viktor Lowenfeld, whose Creative and Mental Growth, first published in 1947, divided children’s drawing into stages that follow age. The other is Rhoda Kellogg, an American nursery school educator, whose Analyzing Children’s Art (1969) sorted a very large collection of children’s drawings and showed that scribbles contain recurring forms.

This post follows children’s drawing from about age two to the first years of school, using their frameworks. One caution first. The ages here are rough guides. As I explain further down, the sources disagree quite a lot about where one stage ends and the next begins, and the researchers themselves say each child grows in their own way. This is not a checklist for worrying that your child is “still at” a stage.

Scribbling: moving the hand is the point

The first stage is scribbling. Making Marks, a booklet for parents and educators from the Department for Education in Tasmania, Australia, describes it on the basis of Kellogg’s and Lowenfeld’s work.

Up to around two, a child’s marks go in many directions and are shaped by how the crayon is held. The child may or may not look at what they are doing. At this point, the booklet says, mark-making is a sensory experience: “the feeling of a crayon in my hand.” Kellogg called this random scribbling.

As children gain control over their arm and hand, they start to connect their movements with the marks on the page. Kellogg called this controlled scribbling. The booklet notes that adults often cannot see the difference between the two. For the child it is a big change, because they can now decide where the marks go.

Kellogg classified scribbles into twenty basic types: dots, vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, curves, zig-zags, loops, spirals, overlaid circles and more. They look meaningless, but each one is a different movement the hand is learning.

From around two, the eyes start to guide the hand, and children begin to care where they put their marks. Some always draw in the middle of the paper, some only along the bottom, some in a diagonal band. Kellogg sorted these habits into placement patterns.

The circle closes and shapes get names

At around three, scribbles begin to look like rough shapes. According to the same booklet, children may start to name their scribbles and think their shapes look like real things.

A child may announce “That’s Mommy” after finishing, or decide halfway through that it is a car after all. A name that comes after the drawing is normal at this age.

The rough shapes then become clear outlines, which Kellogg called diagrams. She listed six: circle, cross, X, square, triangle and odd form. Around three to four, children combine two, three or more of them. A circle with a cross inside (a mandala) and a circle with lines radiating out (a sun) appear often, and Kellogg suggested that the sun and the mandala lead to the first drawings of people.

Tadpole people: the first human figure

For many children, the first “person” is a circle with lines coming out of it: a big round head with two legs attached straight to it and no body. These are called tadpole figures.

A 2015 paper by Gernhardt, Rübeling and Keller of Osnabrück University in Germany describes the tadpole figure as “the child’s first recognizable drawing of a person” and cites earlier research placing it at around age three. The study compared self-drawings by 183 children aged three to six from seven cultural groups. In every group, children who drew a larger head relative to the legs were more likely to attach the arms to the head. Figure size and facial detail, on the other hand, varied with whether children grew up in urban or rural settings.

The missing body does not seem to mean the child doesn’t know about bodies. The same paper cites earlier work showing that children know more about body parts than their drawings suggest. They are not trying to put everything they know on paper. They simply have few drawing conventions yet.

Preschematic: looking for a way to show things

Lowenfeld called the period when a child searches for their own way of representing things (a schema) the preschematic stage. The Tasmanian booklet says it can begin as early as three to four. A circle becomes a sun, the middle of a flower, a person’s head, a beach ball. A square and a triangle make a house, built from known shapes rather than from looking at a real house.

Objects float around the page. Things drawn large are the things that matter to the child, and Lowenfeld thought preschematic drawings say a lot about what is important in a child’s life. Children often talk through what is happening in the picture while they draw. Colors often have nothing to do with reality: purple faces and green skies are common.

Schematic: the ground line and the sky line

Around the start of school, children move into what is called the schematic stage. They settle on their own fixed way of drawing familiar things, such as people, houses and trees, and repeat it.

The best-known feature of this stage is the baseline, a line along the bottom of the page on which the people, house and tree all stand. Many children also add a strip of blue along the top edge for the sky, leaving the space between as air. Drawings that show the inside of a house through its walls, or mix views from above and from the side on the same page, are also common at this stage.

Why the ages differ between sources

I have given ages throughout, but if you put the sources side by side, the boundaries don’t match. The stages reference guide from The Art of Education, a US art education organization, puts scribbling at 18 months to 4 years, preschematic at 3.5 to 7, and schematic at 5 to 9. I think the overlaps are that large because children do not switch stages on a birthday. They drift from one to the next, with the stages overlapping for a long time.

So if a friend of the same age is drawing people while your child is still making loops, that alone is no reason to worry. If you are concerned about development, I would look at drawing together with speech and movement, and talk to your doctor or an early years professional.

What adults can do

The reference guide advises that when children start naming their scribbles, adults should listen but not correct or judge, and should not ask them to copy shapes or draw specific things. For the schematic stage, it says there is no need to correct the baseline or the sun in the corner.

The Tasmanian booklet describes ages four or five to seven as often “a time of crisis in child art,” because adults seldom appreciate spontaneous drawing and give children formulas to copy. Once children learn formulas such as stick figures, they combine them into scenes, and the booklet says these formulas often last into adulthood.

I think it is better to ask a child “Tell me about your picture” than “What is it?” The second question has a right answer. The first does not. With scribbles in particular, children find it easier to talk about how they drew than what they drew. Saying what you can see, such as “lots of loops” or “you pressed hard here,” is enough.

About Kinder Paint

I make Kinder Paint, a drawing app for children ages 2 to 6 on iPhone and iPad. I don’t think of it as a replacement for paper and crayons. Drawing on paper by hand matters in its own right. With that said, a few things in the app relate to the stages above.

The basic Drawing canvas is a square canvas for free drawing. There are six pens, including crayon, pencil and watercolor, plus an eraser. The app tracks only one finger, so a second finger touching the screen in the middle of a scribble doesn’t spoil the line. There is also a shapes tool for circles and squares, a one-tap fill and undo. Drawings save to the device’s photos, so you can keep them with their dates. Looking back a few months later is a good way to see the stages change. There are no ads, no account, and it works offline.

The tracing lessons in Paint Academy are part of the paid Kinder Paint Pro subscription, with a free trial lesson. Tracing is a different activity from drawing freely, and for the reasons in this post I would not let it replace free drawing time.

Getting Started with Kinder Paint covers the first session, and Kinder Paint vs Other Ways for Young Kids to Draw compares it with paper and crayons and other apps.