Don’t talk to me about yourself. Just draw your heart and I’ll know whether you are happy or sad.
Looking at the sky after a heavy rain and seeing the beautiful rainbow makes you sure that those colors have been created for children. And they love to take them from the rainbow and put them into drawings. One of their favorite activities is making pictures or drawings come alive by coloring them. Their whole feelings are on the page. All we have to do is `read` it.
Not all of them will end up being Picassos, but every drawing may give us a hint of what they are concerned about, what they feel like, what makes them happy or sad. Thus, drawings can be a very good method that helps us know our children better, take a peek into their universe.
Lessons from the Loudest Crayon
Specialists say the evolution of drawing depends on the child’s development, but is artistic skills- independent.
As soon as the crayon seems to belong to the little hand as if it were a part of the body, and the child becomes aware of what his drawing represents (because he is intellectually involved in the artistic act), his works will make sense. Before that, doodles represented the child’s pleasure to get dirty, but even these doodles make sense and have been studied by specialists. They talk about his way of being. The unstable child has discontinuous work and abandons his activity early, the happy child has firm lines, and the one filling the whole page wants to take all the attention and love. Holding the pencil also betrays the child’s intellectual development.
Circles, lines, and dots for details are used by early preschoolers, and later on, the objects get more and more detailed with the mental age, and not with the artistic skill. So the child does not have intellectual development delays if his drawing is not very beautiful.
Dreams Painted Outside the Lines
What specialists call the visual realism comes with the ages of 7 and 12 when we can read his inner self by the way he draws lines, by the colors he uses, by geometry, characters, and subject matter. Thin lines, corrections, or even negative comments on his own work betray a shy, timorous ch, while powerful, thick, that make wholes in the paper betray aggressiveness.
When a child’s drawing represents his family, he should be asked questions about the mmembersand one should pay attention to their order in the drawing. This may tell us about the way he feels loved or the place he’s got in his family. If one member is left out, it may mean that there is rejection or conflict. The size of the characters may talk about their importance in the child’s life or the fear he feels toward that person.
An introverted child uses only a few colors, and he chooses the dark ones, while an extroverted child uses a lot of colors and the light, vivid ones.
Drawings talk about the inner world of our children. It is helpful for doctors when they need to figure out the universe the child comes from, and it helps us know our children better and know how to help them develop their personalities and creativity. So let the crayons talk!
