What We Didn’t Know About Children’s Doodles

Parents and educators do not always pay attention to the drawings of children who are just emerging from the age of scribble drawing. It can be difficult for adults to understand the meaning of the enormous intellectual and spiritual work that a drawing child does: we see only a blue “rain” closing an extremely important entry in our own weekly journal … Although child psychologist Maria Osorina is convinced that it is on the example of children’s drawings that one can see what discoveries the child makes, independently comprehending the structure of the world.

• How to analyze children’s drawings?

Don’t lie on the edge!

Between 2 and 2,5 years, the child takes the next step: he discovers that the sheet of paper has edges. If earlier a hand with a pencil could easily go beyond the sheet, now the child begins to react to its edges (recall lullabies and fairy tales, where a completely different life begins beyond the edge of the forest). Approaching them, the lines of doodles follow along the edges of the sheet, go around its corners, tend to return to the inside of the sheet. The edge is one of the first psychologically felt concepts for a small child, he shares a comfortable home world and the outside world, into which he has no way yet. The child already takes into account the boundaries of the situation in which his actions unfold.

First images: «Stand before me like a leaf before grass»

Between the ages of 2,5 and 3, a revolution takes place in children’s drawing. The child suddenly discovers that his «scribbles» may look like something, they may mean something. So the child discovers the iconic function of drawing — the possibility of lines, spots, dots to denote something else. The imperfection of the graphic form does not interfere with the essence of the matter — now the child discovers the opportunity to speak in a pictorial language about everything that is important to him.

The first children’s images are randomly scattered on a sheet of paper — the child draws where there is free space, and therefore easily turns the sheet at an angle convenient for him. There is no up or down for him. At this stage, it is important for the child that he can draw whoever he wants. It is like a magical act for him: «Stand before me like a leaf before grass.» Wanted — painted, called from oblivion, forced to be.

The child enjoys the new ability to inhabit the space of a sheet of paper with any characters subject to him as his creator. And the intellectual task that the child solves is to highlight the necessary and sufficient features needed for the essential characterization of the character — so that a person differs from a dog, a dog from a mouse or a bird. (“A man walks standing, and a dog walks lying down. A man has two legs, but a dog has many and a tail.”)

• «I draw an adult»

Heaven and earth and all the world in between

However, already at the age of 3,5-4, the child takes the next step: he begins to imagine the space of the sheet as the space of the World, which must be organized in a certain way so that characters can be placed there. Under their feet they must necessarily have the earth, and above their heads must be the sky. The line of «earth» can be drawn with a brown or green line, but it can be «typed» from vertical lines — blades of grass, from flowers or mushrooms. It is important for a child that the idea of ​​the soil under his feet, the support on which everything rests, be realized in some form.

… Often, adults do not understand that without this feature for a child, everything depicted in the picture seems to be hanging in the air, almost in space. Often, in drawing classes in kindergarten, children of this age draw a lonely berry, or learn to leave equally correct points with a brush, or circle a leaf with a colored background. This is how the girl “corrected” this state of affairs, doing it not the way it should be, but the right way: the apples do not lie, but hang on a branch, because they were born there, and below the earth and for more fun — a horse!

• «Why do I draw scary pictures?»

Happiness is enough for everyone

Characters are placed in a row between heaven and earth. They stand in such a way that each one is in the fullness of his selfhood — entirely, to his full height and without blocking each other. A childish still life is when an apple, a pear or a pumpkin lie nearby, and no one closes each other. If there is a lake in the picture, and a girl, and a palm tree nearby, then they will all “stand” nearby, including the lake, because in a child’s mind to block someone means to take away a “piece” from him, take away his space . That is why even younger children do not know how to play hide-and-seek for a long time, sit in ambush — “if they don’t see me, then maybe I don’t exist”? (I still remember the boundless respect and delight that a boy, one year older, aroused in me when he drew a fox that stood BEHIND a tree with its tail peeking out to the right! I could not believe how he thought of it before.)

Such a composition is called tape, or frieze.

The art historian A.V. Bakushinsky was the first to describe the frieze organization of drawings of preschool children as early as 1925. She interested him as an art historian with her similarity with the compositional principles of ancient Egyptian images. For a psychologist, it is important that the frieze composition is the child’s first attempt to build a system of spatial coordinates that organizes the picture of the world he creates on a sheet of paper. In this world, the main structure-forming principle is the vertical — the division of the sheet into top, middle and bottom. This is the most ancient principle of the symbolic organization of space in the history of mankind.

Action

A little later than the vertical, the horizontal axis of the drawing becomes significant for the child, which is increasingly associated with the idea of ​​the passage of time. Early childhood images of people are always facing the viewer. Profile drawings appear later. The child begins to use such an image in order to convey the idea of ​​movement, complex plot moves in relationships. This usually happens between 4 and 5 years of age.

… So, in a drawing, a child learns the world, in a drawing he comprehends it, if he is not entirely kind to him, and this is a topic for a separate discussion. Or maybe a child’s drawing to create the world for real? I think so. From each children’s drawing, if you hang it in the house, there is pure light and joy.

In the school near Moscow where I studied, there was such a tradition: on the Eighth of March, first-graders drew not a bouquet for their mother, but her large portrait. There were many classes, from the letter «A» to the letter «D», and sometimes even to «K», even those who were a little older painted, and the whole hall and the first floor from the bottom to the ceiling turned into one continuous and colorful canvas . Entering the school, you found yourself in the most joyful place in the world and walked to your class under the gaze of someone’s smiling mothers, knowing that yours was among them.

Read more in the book by Marina Osorina «The Secret World of Children in the Space of the World of Adults» (Peter, 2011).