Early years practitioners will be better able to support children's learning if they are aware of how children's art develops. Many people have studied the development stages of children's art and come to a general consensus about them, with slight deviances and variations.
Robert Clements in Understanding Progression in Primary Art: The Censape Tapes, categorises this development in five stages:
1 From scribble to symbol
2 Storytelling
3 Using symbols
4 Memory, imagination and observation
5 From symbol to description.
Clements describes early mark-making as scribbles which are simply maps of movement made by the hand that is holding the crayon, brush or pencil.
As the child's motor control develops, their free scribbles become more controlled and they are able to use their mark-making tools to make different marks and shapes. He describes playing with paint as a way of enjoying the physical and sensual properties of colour - that the colours blend when they run down the page.
As the child becomes more confident, so do the patterns and shapes made in colour. They are more controlled.
As the child's motor skills are developed, their confidence in using the materials grows, and a natural progression is for them to label things.
The child begins to associate their marks with the things they are seeing, discovering and feeling in the world around them. Most of the children in the nursery will be at this stage of development, either making symbolic drawings/paintings or in the earlier stage of scribbling.
In shape
As a child develops, their vocabulary of shapes grows - circles, squares, crosses, triangles as well as many irregular shapes. Clements states that children's ability to use shapes to stand for things and represent their experiences is invaluable. 'It helps them overcome their limited vocabulary of spoken and written language and allows them to tell quite complex stories about things they have seen and have experienced.' The child will look at their picture and recognise a shape or shapes within, saying 'That's my baby sister' or 'This is a dinosaur'.
Once the child recognises the symbol, the next phase of development becomes obvious. The child explores the symbol repeatedly and makes new discoveries. Often the first recognisable form is the human figure. It usually takes the form of a large circle or oval representing a head and body, with lines radiating outwards to represent legs and sometimes arms.
The child soon realises the power of the symbol and its potential. For example, they will use a circle to represent not only the body and head of a figure but its eyes, arms, legs and feet, all in one picture. On another occasion it may represent a tree, flower or the sun.
Clements says that all children use the same set of symbols to represent their house in their first drawings - the familiar triangle on a square to represent the roof and building with smaller squares making the windows and door. He suggests that these symbols represent things that are important to the children - 'They are not concerned about or confused by the differences in the images they make and the appearance of things in the real world.' He goes on to describe these pictures as 'private drawings'. The child is not worried about accuracy of scale or time. The picture is a personal form of communication.
From memory
Clements points out that young children will always opt to draw from memory even when being encouraged to draw from first-hand observation. He uses the example of a five-year-old who has been asked to draw a teddy. The teddy bear will be given a cursory glimpse and then drawn from memory using combinations of simple shapes and symbols.
A child eventually becomes increasingly aware of the world around them and the need to move from drawing symbolically to drawing to explain or describe their thoughts, feelings and experiences. There is a move towards representation. The use of colour and tone is important. Grass needs to be green and a bumble bee black and yellow. The child's ability to analyse, interpret and use line, shape, form and space as well as pattern and texture becomes evident.
