Why Kids Are Drawn To White Walls (And What To Do About It)
Last Tuesday, I was wiping crusted glue off my preschool classroom’s blue art table, stepping around a puddle of spilled glitter and a lost googly eye, when I looked up and caught them. Mia, Javi, and Leo, all four years old, huddled shoulder to shoulder against the big blank back wall that’s still waiting for our fall art project. Javi had a pencil he’d snuck from the writing center, and he was dragging it slow across the paint, leaving a soft gray line that curved all the way from his knee to over his head. No one was yelling, no one was running—they were completely quiet, completely focused, taking turns adding to whatever they were making. I was three steps into walking over to stop them before I paused, and remembered: this isn’t new.
I’ve been teaching preschool for seven years, and I’ve noticed the same pattern every single year. We stock extra large easel paper, we roll out butcher paper on the floor for big murals, we have a whole shelf of different sizes of sketchbooks, and still, the blank white stretches of wall are the first place kids sneak off to draw. It’s not just at work, either. At home, my six-year-old son has a 2 by 3 foot whiteboard at his desk, a whole closet full of drawing paper, and a folding art easel we got for his birthday. He still gravitates to the four foot stretch of white wall by our front door, the one we left patched and unpainted after we removed a towel rack last spring. Last month I found a whole family of crayon dinosaurs there, each one as tall as his hand.
I used to think this was just kids being kids—they want to break rules, they want to draw on anything that’s not paper. But a couple years ago, I covered almost that whole back wall with a bulletin board wrapped in tan craft paper, and the only part left uncovered was a small splotch of white, about the size of a textbook, in the corner. For a month straight, that tiny white splotch was the most popular drawing spot in the classroom. No one drew on the big empty tan paper. They all squeezed their doodles into that little white spot. That’s when it clicked: it’s not the wall they’re drawn to. It’s the white.
A few weeks ago, I asked Javi why he’d rather draw on the white wall than the big easel paper we set out. He leaned against the paint, scuffed his sneaker on the baseboard, and said, “The paper ends. The wall doesn’t.” That’s it, isn’t it? Little kids are still getting used to size. They draw a tree on their 8 by 11 paper, and it’s the size of their thumb, but in their head it’s as big as the tree down the street. A blank white wall doesn’t have a built-in border. It doesn’t tell them they have to keep their drawing inside the lines or fit it into a certain space. It’s just… open. White doesn’t compete with whatever they add, either. Any crayon, any marker, any pencil shows up crisp and clear, just like it does in their head. There’s no texture or color getting in the way of what they want to make.
For the longest time, I treated this as a behavior problem. I’d catch doodles, scrub them off, remind kids over and over that walls aren’t for drawing. It never worked. So last year I tried something different. I measured off a 4 by 8 foot section of that back white wall, bought a $10 pack of extra large magic erasers and a bulk pack of washable tempera sticks, and told the class that spot was for drawing, anytime they wanted. It was that easy. Do they still use the easels and the sketchbooks? Of course they do. But when they want to make a dinosaur as big as their whole body, or a road that goes all the way across for their toy cars, they go to the white wall. At home, I did the same thing: I taped a 4 foot sheet of white butcher paper over that unpainted stretch by the front door, and kept a pack of washable crayons in the entryway basket. That cut down on rogue doodles around the rest of the house by 90%.
I know not everyone wants to give up a whole section of wall in their house or classroom. You don’t have to. A cheap white shower curtain liner taped to the wall behind a couch works just as well—you can wipe it down, and yank it down and tuck it in a closet when you have guests over. If you already have colored walls, the butcher paper trick is cheap and easy to replace when it’s full. I don’t recommend whiteboards, actually—they’re shiny, and kids get the idea that they have to erase their drawing right after they make it. A matte white space, whether it’s paint or paper or a shower liner, feels like their work can stay up for a little while, which matters more than you’d think.
What if they still sneak doodles on undesignated spots? Don’t yell. More often than not, they didn’t do it to be bad. They just saw an empty white spot and the urge hit them before they thought. I keep a magic eraser under my sink at home and by the art table at school, and I just hand it to them. “That’s a really cool rocket ship,” I’ll say, “but that spot isn’t for drawing. Let’s wipe it off together, and I’ll walk you over to the drawing wall.” No lecture, no time-out, just a quick clean-up and a redirect. That works way better than getting mad, because it doesn’t turn their need for space into a fight.
This week, our classroom’s white drawing wall has a whole city sprawled across it, with skyscrapers that touch the ceiling and a giant dragon breathing orange fire in the corner. Every time I walk by, someone’s added a new car to the road or a window to a building. On Friday afternoon, I’ll grab my magic eraser and wipe it clean, and next week they’ll start all over with something new. It’s a little extra work, but it’s worth it. I still catch the occasional kid sneaking a tiny doodle on the other white stretches of wall once in a blue moon. I don’t stress about it anymore. Kids are drawn to empty, open space where they can make something as big or as messy as they want. White walls just happen to be the best place for that. It’s not a problem to fix. It’s just what kids do.
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