The reflections of children's emotions on the images and symbols in the context of lines, compositions, color

Human beings use various ways to express themselves and communicate. Written and visual expressions that contain emotions and thoughts are structures created to give a message to the society. Art, which is a visual communication tool among these structures that push people to think multidimensionally, contains an extremely complex sequence. The analysis of the sequences on the surface, which consists of verbal and visual images and conveys the message it contains to the viewer, and reaching the sub-meanings bring along experimental readings. For example, we can show the activity of painting as an action that the child performs when her linguistic skills are not yet fully mature. The language that the child uses as a means of self-expression emerges with the drawings in which the emotions are explained. Children's pictures, which can contain many clues about the child, are therefore extremely important. This research is based on the phenomenon of mood states, what kind of images do positive or negative emotional states transform into in children's paintings in subconscious and unconscious situations, what these images mean and how their life stories contribute to these analyses. Piaget's cognitive development theory, which has scientific studies on the cognitive development of the child, constitutes the theoretical structure that supports the study. In addition, Viktor Lowenfeld's developmental stages, which include the artistic development of the child, are discussed in sub-headings with age ranges. By giving information about whether the principles and elements of painting such as composition, line, rhythm-movement, balance, texture, color, light-shadow, shape (form), ratio, perspective contribute to the understanding in children's paintings, the subject of mood has been processed and depending on the emotions of the children. The pictures they made were presented as a descriptive case study with the snowball sampling method, one of the qualitative research methods. In this study, in which the "Picture Content Evaluation Inventory" was used as a tool, average and percentage calculations were made on the positive and negative emotional states determined. It was observed that while the percentage of the participants was concentrated on negative mood, positive and neutral moods were equally distributed with each other.