Through a decade-long experience working with preschool children, I am constantly amazed by their expressiveness and depth of meaning in their artwork. In my thesis, Comparison of Drawing and Sculptural Representations of the Human Figure at Different Ages of the Preschool Child, I wanted to outline how rich the artistic legacy of preschool children can be.
In the theoretical part, I included testimonies from various authors about the importance of artistic expression in the preschool period. I wanted to present the depth of artistic expression that should be presented to children in kindergarten with a different approach i.e., an approach that emphasizes the process rather than the final product. Based on the description of the artistic development, which is primarily based on the child's drawing, I also touched on the artistic development in shaping clay. The theoretical part also includes a description of the artistic fields that I highlighted in my thesis – drawing and sculpture. On the surface, the two artistic fields seem to be opposites, as one requires a representation of two-dimensionality and the other of three-dimensionality, but they have a lot in common, which I described in the chapter "The Connection between Drawing and Sculpting." Since I chose the human figure- specifically the mother- as the research object, I also provided theoretical support for the development of the human figure in preschool children.
Artistic development and characteristics of shaping clay in preschool age and human figure development in sculpture are relatively poorly researched areas with a very limited range of professional literature. This is what inspired me to choose the topic of my thesis and plan the research. In the empirical part, my goal was to discover the characteristics of the human figure in the preschool period through shaping clay and compare them with the characteristics that appear in the same age period when drawing with a pencil. The study included children aged 2 to 6 years and consisted of drawing and sculpting. In the drawing part, children drew their mother with a pencil, and in the sculpting part, they shaped their mother from clay.
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