Creating art is a great way to calm anxiety. You are doing something just for you because it is fun. Try to de-stress with artwork if you are feeling overwhelmed. Here are a few art therapy ideas to think about.
1. Plein Air Painting
Artists have done Plein Air paintings for hundreds of years. Plein Air essentially means that you are going outside to quickly paint nature, and capturing the various effects of light and atmosphere in your painting. The easiest and most economical medium for Plein Air painting is probably watercolors.
Choose a part of the landscape that you want to capture in your painting, and set up a place where you can see your subject and comfortably paint for a few hours. If you have a large window in your home that has an interesting view to look through, this will work as well.
Don’t rush through your painting, but try to capture the cast shadows of the day before they change too much. The changing daylight makes it hard to spend too much time dwelling on details, which is part of the appeal of the Plein Air painting.
Capturing an accurate portrayal of the changing colors of the sky is fun to attempt. The trees, buildings, and flowers you might be painting will look different in the late afternoon than they did in the early morning. If you’re really excited about Plein Air painting, try painting the same scene a few times in different daylight.
2. Fimo Dough Beads
Working with clay is always pretty relaxing for most people. Clay is the original stress ball, and polymer clay makes baking clay into lasting art pieces easy and cheap.
If you want to make a small sculpture from polymer clay (‘Fimo’ dough), that is a very good project to de-stress. Another fun project to make is patterned beads.
By taking two colors that you like together, making a rope of each, then twisting them together like a candy cane, you can then cut off a small portion of that rope, and roll it into a ball. The clay colors will marble and make fun effects. Use a small tool to poke a hole in your bead before baking it for use in jewelry or other projects.
By making ropes of color and putting them together into a larger rope, then cutting off segments of the multicolor rope, you can make many unique patterns of beads. Have fun and experiment. There are no real rules, and therefore nothing to stress about.
3. Cartooning
Have you ever wanted to write a comic strip? People who have zero ability to draw have somehow managed to overcome that obstacle by writing witty comic strips to go along with some less than technically great cartoons.
Cartooning is a great beginner-level project for artists, and a fun way to de-stress. If you are more focused on the drawing portion of the project, you can pull up hundreds (if not thousands) of easy tutorials on drawing classic cartoon characters.
The best part about cartoons is that you can get away with very basic drawing skills if you are witty enough to write interesting dialogue. If the cartoons are purely for your own enjoyment, then there is very little pressure to impress anyone else. Write a cartoon about your life, or a joke you heard. Make your comic strip into a diary about the trials and tribulations of your life. You can’t get much more therapeutic than that!
No matter what you decide to do with your therapeutic art, make sure it is something enjoyable to you. Stressing over pointless thoughts like “I can’t draw”, or “I can’t paint” are counterproductive, and not necessarily even true. Try to remember when you were little and you drew with crayons just because you loved to color. The pure happiness of making something just for fun is a good way to create some needed joy in your own life.
Article Submitted By Community Writer
