Week 12: Multicolored Feelings

Before you get started with this week’s small art, take a few minutes to do some journaling that’s a continuation of last week’s theme of celebrating and expressing YOU. Well, at least this much journaling: Write down five positive things about yourself.

Do you see those things in your collage?

If you missed last week, you can catch up here. New to the 52-Week Art Journal Journey? This is where we started.

Do you have your five positive things yet?

Here’s one more..

You’re taking time for creative self-care and making art!

Don’t miss your chance

If you aren’t subscribed for my weekly email, and/or missed last week’s prompt, you don’t yet know that I have a birthday coming up, and one way I’m celebrating is by gifting a $50 Blick Art Materials gift certificate to someone reclaiming their creativity and establishing a healthy habit of creative self-care! Subscribers have an automatic entry, and anyone reading this can enter here for 50 for My 50th.

If you ant to jump into today’s video, scroll on down. But there’s usually something in my writing I missed in my video.

The question…

Here’s where we start today….

How are you feeling, Friend?

Get out your colored pencils or markers, or colored pencils AND markers, and choose a color that represents how you’re feeling.

I chose an interesting shade of purple marker and drew a rectangle… Actually, in the video you can see I chose that shade of purple marker both times I filmed this week’s creative self-care art project. You can draw a rectangle or square or circle or even triangle, some simple shape that can act as a sort of frame for today’s small art. Whatever suits your emotions of the moment.

Inside that frame…

Color how you’re feeling, what you’re feeling.

If you missed the first video about drawing feelings, you can start there, especially if this isn’t the type of thing that comes naturally to you. If this feels awkward, arting through that prompt will help you get thinking about how to represent, in color and shape, something that can be felt but not seen. 

For this week’s small art, take some time to feel what you’re feeling, and put it on paper.

But not in words.

Use your colors. And let your emotions guide your hand.

I know.

To some of you that just sounds… weird.

Been there.

But even if you think it’s weird, even if you’re questioning whether or not you want to do this week’s art, even if you’re feeling like taking the time for this is a waste of time, it’s worth trying.

My colors and feelings

My abstract art lately, as I mentioned in last week’s prompt post, is following a theme. The sunny bright cheerful, darkened… then brightened again…

In case you need to be reminded… Darkness lifts… Light gets back in.

I’m a little bit in love with yellow. Particularly contrasted with my long-loved deep purple. And indigo. The hints, the streaks, the shots of orange; I didn’t expect to become a thing. And while I was doing this week’s art it came to mind that it may be because of the sunsets/sunrises I got into last year, as I was reclaiming my art, my creativity, during #The100DayProject with #My100DayArtJournal. Particulary with Words upon Words.

If you haven’t arted that prompt, you should. I love it. It’s one of my favorite mind-dump, clear-my-head, vent, process, whatever-it-needs-to be small art. It was something I’d done to process things at times for years, but that I refined into its own art process in my first art journal.

After you art it, write it

Why did you choose the colors you chose?

Hiw does what you colored represent what’s going on inside?

How does it feel to see how you’re feeling?

Did how you felt change as you gave your feelings color and shape?

Why a frame?

As I’ve said in several prompts, we should never just ignore our feelings.

They’re real. And should be acknowledged.

If we don’t like them, we shouldn’t just try to convince ourselves they’re not there.

When we ignore unpleasant emotions, we end up giving them more power.

Our emotions need to be accepted. Accepted as real and present, but not as the definition of our reality.

By acknowledging our emotions, agreeing with them that they’re there for a reason, and being willing to understand why they’re there, we’re more likely to be able to keep them from steamrolling us.

Don’t ignore your emotions.

But remember they’re just emotions.

Don’t let them run you.

They change.

And you’re bigger than they are.