The master's thesis explores the role of drawing as creative and expressive tool in social work with children and adolescents. The professional problem stems from the gap between the principle of holistic cooperation with users and practice, which often relies on verbal communication, whereby some children and adolescents may have difficulty expressing their feelings and life context. The purpose of the research is to examine how children and adolescents express their emotions through drawing, which motifs and colours are most commonly used to represent positive and negative emotions, how the expression of emotions differs according to age, and how children experience and reflect on artistic creation, and what insights they gain from it.
The research consists of a theoretical and a research part. In the theoretical part, I first present basic and complex emotions. Then I present the developmental period of children and adolescents. In the third part, I present children's drawings in more detail. I conclude the theoretical part with the help of visual arts. In the research part, I conducted a qualitative study of drawing with 12 participants, whereby the data was collected with the help of a group drawing workshop and supplemented with individual interpretation and reflection by children and adolescents. The data was processed qualitatively, followed by a record of the results, discussion, and suggestions for further practice.
I found that joy is expressed as an emotion depicted with the greatest colour diversity and varied motifs. Anger is expressed through drawing as an emotion depicted through a central motif, with less use of diverse colours. Sadness is expressed as an emotion in which the central motif was most often related to the weather or the school environment. When depicting fear, the colour grey was most often used, and the central motif was related to animals or darkness. I found that the drawings of participants who are transitioning to the realistic phase are spatially simpler. The drawings of participants in the realistic phase show a higher level of visual representation. The participants evaluated the workshop positively and were satisfied with their work. With the help of the workshop, the participants learned to express their emotions through drawing.
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