Art therapy is a practice that is becoming more and more popular and, over the last few years, has firmly established itself in the likes of hospitals, mental health centers, and even drug rehab centers as a way of reducing stress, increasing focus, and improving productivity.
When you may need rehabilitation for drugs, there are dozens of ways in which therapists create programs to ensure patients have a successful recovery, ranging from yoga to equine therapy, family therapy to art, and today more people than ever before are feeling the benefit of expressing themselves through their artwork.
There are many exercises out there worth trying, not necessarily even if you’re struggling with mental health or addiction. Essentially, if you want to find a way to relax, improve your concentration or even release your emotions a little more freely, here are some great art therapy exercises you should try.
Paint Your Emotions
First and foremost, it can be as simple as painting your emotions. There’s no real brief to this; just paint how you feel. It can be as concentrated or as abstract as you want; get a canvas or sketchbook, a pot of paint, and some pencils, and spend an hour letting your emotions run loose on the page.
Many people feel the benefit of this, and from your work, you can get a real sense of how you’re feeling. By doing this regularly, you’ll notice a change in your work over time as your emotions change, perhaps beginning with anger or sadness and evolving into a calmer-looking piece of work.
Create Postcards You’ll Never Send
You may find that the reason you’re feeling a certain way and the reason you’ve turned to art therapy is because of someone or something happening in your life. Please get to the root of the problem, and create postcards for them, pulling together the artwork and then writing how they make you feel. It’s a way of expressing yourself and your emotions and then storing those postcards safely at home.
You don’t need to send them, and they could be something you revisit over time, again looking back on how your feelings towards them may have changed. That could be from anger to redemption or sadness at the loss of a loved one through to being able to look back on the good times you had with them.
Collage Your Perfect Day
Many people turn to art to escape their day-to-day life, so why not really escape and create a collage representing a perfect day? It’s wanderlust at its finest, and you can be as free as you want with it.
What’s more, you can hang it proudly in your home and even work towards creating that perfect day as part of the process.