Art Therapy At Home

Hihi! Today I thought I'd talk about something very close to my heart: art therapy. I started attending an art therapy group back at the end of last year, and I'm just coming into my last few weeks of attending. When I'm finished, I'm sure I'll write up a whole post about my experience, but today I thought I'd share some ideas for doing art therapy at home.

art therapy; noun

a form of psychotherapy involving the encouragement of free self-expression through painting, drawing, or modelling, used as a remedial or diagnostic activity.

 

 For the most part, during my art therapy sessions I like to draw/colour. I've used a variety of things to do this, including pastels, felt tips, paint and colouring pencils. I've found that I tend to a lot more colouring during sessions when I've had a particularly anxious/stressed week because I find it really calms me and helps me relax. Because of this, my mum bought me this colouring book full of beautiful mandalas. I find it really soothing and distracting to colour small, complicated patterns because you really have to pay attention to it and you sort of forget about your problems. For a little while, anyway.

 Another adult colouring book I have is this one which is simply named Art Therapy Colouring Book. I absolutely ADORE this book. I used it last week at art therapy and traced from really intricate drawings of an octopus and some jellyfish. This book is a mix of patterns and larger drawings, some of which as very simple where-as others are a lot more complex. If you prefer more intricate patterns and drawings to colour in then definitely go for this one over the Mandala colouring book. As you can see from the photo below, some of the pages already have little bits coloured in which I think is nice because you can select your colours a lot simpler that way. Here's one of the pages I've completed - I used red, orange, a little yellow, blue and green to colour in this fox design.



 Another way to do art therapy at home is by using a Wreck This Journal. I've done several posts on the pages I've completed, which you can check out here > (part one / part two / part three / part four). The Wreck This Journal is amazing for art therapy, as it challenges and inspires you to break free creatively and to try new things. There are pages for you to fill out when you're angry, a place for negative thoughts, a page for you to tear out and throw away, and a page that instructs you to basically throw your journal out of a window (which I did - it was awesome). I think that the WTJ is a simpler step into the world of art therapy, because it has instructions written on each page for you to interpret, rather than you having to think of something to do off the top of your head.

 

I hope that this post was helpful! I find both of these activities to be really calming and distracting when I'm having a particularly sad/anxious day, so I thought I'd share them with you. Please do look out for my 'art therapy experience' post in the future!

 

Instagram | Twitter | Bloglovin | Pinterest | Goodreads