Happiness
The Skadoodle began with something most of us have tucked away somewhere.
A notebook from school. A yearbook covered in signatures and sketches. A folder full of drawings that somehow survived every move, every cleanup, and every attempt to get organized.
Almost everyone has a doodle story.
Some of us drew in the margins of our homework. Some filled entire notebooks with characters, creatures, graffiti, patterns, inventions, and ideas. Some never stopped. We still doodle during meetings, while talking on the phone, sitting at a desk, or simply passing the time.
What fascinated me wasn’t only that people made these drawings.
It was that they kept them.
A doodle is supposed to be temporary. Yet somehow, they survive for years—sometimes decades. They are tucked into drawers, folders, keepsake boxes, and old notebooks. Then one day they are rediscovered, and a simple sketch becomes a reminder of who we were, what made us laugh, what we imagined, and the things we once loved to create.
The original idea behind The Skadoodle was simple:
Bring the doodles to light.
Give those drawings a home. Create a family-friendly place where people could share something they made, whether it came from a classroom thirty years ago or from the refrigerator after the magnet finally gave up.
But something happened as The Skadoodle began to grow.
The more I thought about why people kept their childhood artwork, the more I realized that the real story was not only about the drawings.
It was about what creating had meant to them.
It was confidence. Curiosity. Imagination. Independence. It was the freedom to make something that had never existed before and say, “This came from me.”
That changed the mission.
The Skadoodle could not stop at giving old doodles a place to live. It needed to help the next generation create new ones—and help children understand that art is much larger than a perfect painting hanging in a museum.
Art can be a drawing, a photograph, a building, a song, a game, a story, a sculpture, a strange invention, or an idea scribbled in the corner of a worksheet. Creativity does not belong to one kind of student, one kind of classroom, or one kind of artist.
It belongs to everyone.
Today, The Skadoodle is becoming a free, ever-growing creative world for children, teachers, families, and anyone looking for a doorway into art.
Children can discover artists and the worlds they lived in. They can explore how human creativity has changed across thousands of years. They can draw, paint, solve puzzles, play games, meet original characters, take on creative challenges, and share their own work.
Teachers can find ready-to-use resources without having to begin every lesson from scratch. Families can explore together without subscriptions, advertisements, required videos, or outside noise competing for a child’s attention.
Everything connects to one larger purpose:
Helping children believe that art belongs to them—and that they have something worth adding to it.
The Skadoodle does not exist to tell children what every artwork must mean or what kind of art they should make. When an artist’s intention is known, we present it honestly. When history leaves us with uncertainty, we say so. Then we give children room to look, wonder, ask questions, and form thoughtful ideas of their own.
We want children to learn the names and stories of artists who came before them, but we also want them to understand that art history is not finished.
They are part of what comes next.
This mission has also been shaped by watching creativity inside my own family—through my wife Kristi’s work as a special-education teacher, through our children’s experiences with art, and through seeing how differently children think, communicate, and create when they are given the freedom and encouragement to do so.
Not every child will grow up to become a professional artist.
That is not the point.
Creativity helps children solve problems, communicate ideas, build confidence, recognize different perspectives, and discover parts of themselves that may not appear on a test. The child who struggles to explain an idea in words may be able to draw it. The student who does not feel noticed anywhere else may create something impossible to overlook.
Sometimes, one person taking a child’s creation seriously is enough to change how that child sees themselves.
That is what The Skadoodle wants to do.
We are building art-history experiences, creative tools, classroom resources, original games, galleries, student challenges, and places where imagination can run without being interrupted by advertising or pressure to be perfect.
The website will continue to change because creativity does not stand still. New rooms will open. New artists will be discovered. New games will be played. New children will make things none of us could have imagined for them.
The Skadoodle started with a question about why people keep their doodles.
It grew into a promise to the children making them now.
Their artwork matters.
Their ideas matter.
Their voices matter.
The future of art does not begin when a child enters a museum, wins an award, or learns to draw something perfectly.
It begins the moment they create something and realize:
I made this.
That is the rise of The Skadoodle.
And we are only getting started.
Bring the doodles to light.
Every art matters. Just be you.
Welcome to The Skadoodle.