The Use of Children’s Drawings in Structure, Character and Concept Design of Animation (A case study: Farshid Shafiei’s and Mahdiyar’s selected art works)

Painting is an art form that reflects our imagination (or internal vision) or our perspective of our surroundings. One of Children’s use of paintings is to realize and depict dream and insights that are sometimes unattainable for them. Children do not select drawing instruments randomly; their choice indicates their personality. Painting is a natural process for a child, and due to insufficient verbal expression, children prefer to use art for communication. A child expresses their feelings for such things as dreams, hopes, nightmares, fears and joys by using line, form and color in drawing. Lines and forms that apparently may not mean anything special to anyone else, reflect and reveal their character traits. The important period of childhood painting starts from  age 2 and continues until 13. This period is divided into different intervals in terms of a child’s cognative and verbal ability such as 2 to 3 years old, 3 to 5 years old, 5 to 8 years old and 8 to 13 years old. Identification with children’s ability to express themselves through visual art has always received much attention by various individuals, including artists who attempt to attract children via a variety of methods. Animation is considered an artistic and captivating media for children that can make the impossible world possible for them; therefore, it can be used to convey concepts to children. Drawing one of the popular cartoon characters in the world of animation is interesting for them. Children see themselves in these animations and observe that their favorite hero can do and experience things that they cannot do in their real life. Children normally intend to be in the place of their favorite cartoon characters. This reaction can be vividly observed in children's drawings as they take their favorite characters as role models. Animation artists, such as the painter and animator, Farshid Shafiei, have created a lot of art work with this vision. Shafiei can be regarded as an illustrator, writer and animation director. In his works, Shafiei attempts to discover new visual possibilities and in each animation, he extracts potential capacities and pursues a story of abstraction. Mahdiyar is also a child whose paintings have been observed and analyzed from the age of 3 to 8. Using an integrated consensus of pediatric psychologists, the present study attemptes to persuade a functional psychological view on this demography, based on collecting data from library/field sources and audio-visual archives as well as case studies. Hence, three short animation films: Persimmon, My Dad’s Car, and Sidewalk produced by Farshid Shafiei and selected works of Mahdiyar have been chosen and analyzed. The result indicates that children’s painting can be a special source for creating animation in a new style in terms of simplicity in style, color and illustration that can create appropriate suitable connection with the audienc.