ART AS A TOOL OF EXPRESSION AND COMMUNICATION:

To begin, it is important to note that there is a great risk in interpreting children's drawings. It is an even greater risk in trying to deal with children as if the interpretations are reliable information.

Sometimes children's drawings are truthful representations of the world as they know it. Adults risk reading other kinds of messages from these drawings and begin to treat the children as if they did in fact have problems.

However, it is not to say that children's drawings cannot provide a valuable clue towards their behaviour. For some children, art and drawing provides as a catharsis.

Often, children uses art activities as a means of expressing themselves. Frustration and other kinds of emotions is likely to arise in young children and they may not be able to deal with it and express it as adults do in a rational manner.

Most children approach art with earnestness, whether it is scribbling or making a detailed drawing. Drawing provides children the opportunity to put down on paper their feelings and emotions. As they are not particularily self-conscious about their art, they do not hide their feelings when drawing. For the most part, children put into their drawings their experience and objects which are of importance to them.

As children's art skills develop in different age groups, from making scribbles to forming basic shapes to making mandalas, suns, humans, animals, and trees, it is evident that at each stage, they tend to draw objects that have made a mental and emotional effect on them. These things tend to be emphasized according to their own scale of values, usually by drawing them first and larger.

Children's drawings are of great value as projections of personalites. In the following pages, we will be looking particularily at the drawing of the family and the body.

 

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