This study makes a contribution to knowledge through art practice by producing – for the first time – a meta-analysis of children’s scribble typologies and an examination of the correlations between those typologies and simple pictorial structures produced by adults in the context of the rectangle. This research is predicated on the primacy of art practice as a means of research enquiry, both in its role as a materials-based and visual means of finding things out and by using practice as a comparative method across fields and disciplines. The wider significance of this study is its contribution to the development of methodologies of Fine Art practice through research and through emphasising the underdeveloped links between artists’ image making, established cognitive and semiotic research into pictorial typologies and the graphic structures found in children’s drawings.

Application of lines and marks to a rectangular surface is a typical method of pictorial construction. Picture making occurs early in human development when infants begin to scribble, usually on rectangular sheets of paper. Studies of the early developmental stages of children’s drawings have identified basic kinds of scribble pattern that evolve into more well-defined graphic forms. A meta-analysis of these typologies had never been put together before this research was undertaken. Nor had a comparison been made between typologies of scribble pattern and the pictorial structures occurring in the simplest visual communication designs produced by adults. Such a comparative study had never been used to generate a body of new artwork as research. The findings indicate that there is a finite typology of 41 Primary Line Formations that are commonly found across studies of children’s spontaneous gestural mark-making. This was compared with the simplest adult designed pictorial structures, namely heraldic partitions and alphanumeric displays. As practice-based research, this PhD demonstrates that, in the context of the rectangle, the phenomena under study are related in terms of: 1. Configural morphology and how this is perceived; 2. Modes of representation and types of abstraction; 3. Modularity.