7 Art Prompts to Ease Your Mind

School, part-time jobs, and social media can be stressful day to day. Let's be honest, the struggle is real! It can be tough to talk to friends and family about these hardships and sometimes we don’t always want to. Here at DoSomething we get it, and that’s why our Mind Craft campaign, part of our Camp Reboot program, is here to give you an option towards healing - and it’s as simple as getting some watercolors! Don’t take our word for it, art therapist and social influencer Pierra D. Brown has all the tea on how art can ease your mind and make your day get a whole lot colorful!

If you are struggling with some creative ideas here are 7 therapeutic art activities, curated and designed by Pierra D. Brown that encourage mindfulness, relaxation, and some emotional exploration. As you begin this creative journey try to keep in mind that therapeutic art making is all about process over product, there is no right or wrong way to create your experiences or emotions.

Need help working through a creative block? Maybe you just want to loosen up your creative muscles!

• Crumpled Paper Art: Crumple a piece of paper. Using a marker, follow along the lines. Once everything is outlined, color and fill-in the spaces.
• Fill the Page: Using your art supplies fill in a piece of paper with different shapes, lines, and/or colors.

There are also art activities that promote emotional exploration.

• Collaged Emotions: On the back of a piece of paper write out 2-3 emotions you experienced throughout the day. Select one emotion to start with; go through magazines or printouts cutting out words and images that represent the chosen emotion. Once you are done, arrange and glue down the cuttings creating visual representation.
• Feel Good Still Life: A still life is a group of inanimate objects that are grouped and stacked artistically so that an artist can paint or draw the objects they’re looking at. For this specific still life, you will gather objects that are special to you, things that make you feel calm, relaxed, bring you joy, make you smile, etc. Once the items are gathered, creatively stack and layer them. Using your art supplies, begin visually recreating the chosen items.

Perhaps you want to ship words and art to make something special.

• Blackout Poetry: Using an old and unused book, this can be thrifted, you are going to tear out a few pages. Select one page to work with. Do not read the entire page, but instead scan the page for words that stand out and connect to you. Decide if you want your page to make sense or if you want it to be more creative. Once you have, use a pencil to circle your selected words. The words you are not using you have the choice of using something black to darken them out or creating an illustration to reflect the poem you made.
• Illustrate the Lyric or Quote: Choose a song lyric or quote that has some significant meaning to you and using your art supplies create an illustration to represent it.
• Rip It Up: Using pieces of paper; colored, textured, or blank you will create a torn paper collage or mosaic. To begin, you will take a piece of paper and begin journaling or writing about something or someone you want to move on from, let go of, or get off of your chest. Once you have finished writing, begin to tear up the writing. Using the torn pieces from your writing, other papers, and any other materials you will create a collage or mosaic symbolizing how you feel after being able to release and let go.