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Coping Activities Part 2


ART JOURNALING

Art Journaling is a fun, creative way to cope with the changes going on right now.  Using art to help you get through stressful times can have many benefits. It can be calming, relaxing, bring joy, and give you a way to express your feelings and emotions, and art journaling is a great activity to explore at home.

You can use magazine cut outs or draw your own pictures. You can use swirls and colour, line and white space and dark space…the options are as vast as your imagination! You can create an altered book journal using old books or magazines that no one will read anymore (if you are having a heart attack at the thought of “destroying” a book, consider that you are rather giving a book new life 😉 ). You can also, of course, use a regular journal – either lined or blank – and doodle, draw and write.

The beautiful thing about art journaling, is that there are no rules!  Some art journals are more like sketchbooks, some are like diaries, some are like scrapbooks – and some are a smash up of all those things.  Your art journal can be whatever you need it to be. The key is to just get started, and let it become whatever it needs to. Here are some of the reasons that you might want to start art journaling:

  1. Get your thoughts and feelings from inside your head, to outside your head
  2. Goal setting and dreaming
  3. Spur on creativity
  4. It’s fun 🙂

Journaling can be very therapeutic – meaning it can make you feel a lot better. When you are writing in a journal, you get your thoughts onto paper so they aren’t stuck inside your head.  Art journaling does the same thing as writing, just in a different way, through a different method. If you like to write, then journaling probably isn’t new to you.  Art journaling, however, might be!  There are lots of different tutorials online that can get you started, but basically all you need is the following:

  1. Journal – old book, blank notebook, even blank sheets of paper stapled together
  2. Pencil, pen, markers
  3. White glue
  4. Old magazines or pictures
  5. Craft paint or watercolour paints
  6. Whatever other art supplies you have on hand

I would like to encourage you to explore this way of coping in this stay home season.  As always, I love seeing your works of art – so keep sending me your pictures!

Til next time – stay safe, stay positive and stay home.

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