Kellogg’s Scribbles

What is more pure than childhood memories of floor scribbling with paint on paper? The first NFT collection we launched on Opensea was inspired by the childhood scribbles classification system developed in the mid-twentieth century by renowned early childhood scholar and collector of children's artwork, Rhoda Kellogg (1898–1987). It was a small collection with twenty hand drawn pieces. Each piece represented one of twenty classifications of basic scribbles by Kellogg (see Figure 1) — from a dot, to a spiral, to a multi-line circle.

Figure 1: Rhoda Kellogg’s basic scribble classifications

Kellogg classified the first types of scribbles a child draws — starting at around 24 months — as twenty basic patterns. As a child grew, these patterns would coalesce into shapes, then designs, and finally into pictorial representations of the real world (for more detail, see here).

In the era before widespread computer use, Kellogg, also the director of a nursery school in San Francisco, collected and analyzed over one million samples of childhood drawings. These drawings were primarily collected at the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association in San Francisco, but also included samples of childhood drawings from around the world. (For a digital archive of many of these drawings, see here.)

Scribble #11: Roving enclosed line

Like Kellogg, the focus of this initial collection was restricted to line formations. Kellogg’s theory was that formal design emerges before pictorialism; by focusing on concepts first, we hoped to explore the same path of graphic development that children follow. Each of the twenty scribbles were re-imagined in bright colors with subdued backgrounds, deliberately simplified and limited compared to the complexity and volume of many of the large-scale generative NFT projects today.

Scribble #8: Multiple diagonal line

We tried not to take this first exploration too seriously — it’s fun to doodle with paint. The next explorations of this continuum will likely be generative — what if Kellogg had been able to analyze and reproduce these drawings at a massive scale? — or progressing to the design stage using these basic concepts.