Better With Art: Resolutions & Resolution

Welcome to the first week of Better With Art. Let’s bid an artful farewell to 2023 and embrace the fresh start of 2024 with color. I’m Melinda, and I’m here to encourage you to reclaim your creativity and establish a healthy habit of creative self-care.

It feels weird to be starting something new from the 52-Week Art Journal Journey while it is still 2023, at least the first day of the first week of Better With Art.
But that is just the way the calendar works, and here we are. As mentioned, this week, let’s make it all about color.

In last week’s email, I talked about two definitions for the word resolution. The type we most think about this time of year that concerns making a choice to work on establishing a habit in order to accomplish something.

As I have encouraged you to make creative self-care a priority in 2024 and am here to help you with weekly creative self-care prompts, regardless of whether or not you call it a resolution or think of it as a resolution. As I mentioned last week, I’m not really a New Year’s resolution person, but there have been various times in my life where I made a decision to work on establishing a new habit.

The best one I recently made was in February of 2022 when I started the 100 Day Project, which is a commitment to make art every day for 100 days. I decided my first project would be an art journal, even though I didn’t really know what an art journal is. And when I say an art journal, I don’t just mean the making of art and journaling I mean actually making the physical journal, which was a lot of fun.

And establishing that regular habit of art-making was transformative for me.

I always knew that art was good for me. When I was younger, I made a lot of it. But as I got older, too often there were things that seemed more important, as well as times when what I didn’t realize was called anhedonia, made nothing pleasant.

I couldn’t enjoy anything, so I couldn’t enjoy art-making.

But here’s the thing, even when I couldn’t enjoy it, art was good for me. But for too long I convinced myself that it wasn’t important, that it wasn’t worth the time, despite the evidence of how balancing and healthy it is for me.

With the 100 Day Project, I had a tool to accomplish what by that point I was accepting was important to accomplish. I committed to 100 days of art-making. In my own art journal I made myself. And I proved to myself how important art-making is to my mental and emotional and spiritual health.

It’s why there was a 52-Week Art Journal Journey.

If you missed it, click here to check it out. All 52 prompts will remain on YouTube. Some of the audio is pretty bad and, well, I’m also still working on improving my video quality, too.

It’s never too late to reclaim your creativity. It’s never a bad time to make creative self-care a priority, or return to making it a priority and working on establishing your own healthy habit of creative self-care.

I’m living proof of the difference art-making can make.

And that’s why I’m back this year with more weekly prompts.

Maybe making art regularly and establishing a healthy habit of creative self-care is the first type of resolution for you.

The other type of resolution is when a situation or problem is solved or resolved.

There are things in life that we can’t fix, that we can’t solve, that we can’t resolve. There are relationships we can’t heal. There are apologies we will never receive, or will never be able to offer.

There are so many things in this world that are beyond our control, no matter how close to home they hit.

We can, however, take more control over how they affect us and how much they twist us up inside. We may not be able to solve and resolve all situations, all problems, but we can work toward, and find, internal resolution.

And art helps.

Throughout the 52-Week Art Journal Journey, I mentioned many times how art-making can be a safe and useful antidepressant. It can help calm anxiety. Art-making can help us heal. It gives our minds the opportunity to quiet. Both for the sake of just quieting and also to give us the opportunity to see and feel things more clearly.

As I’ve also mentioned many times, all of our emotions are valid. They deserve to be acknowledged. But we can’t be truly healthy if they’re running us.

One of the benefits of creative self-care art-making is helping us recognize and acknowledge and take control of our emotions. Art-making can help us resolve some of our pain, our anger, frustration, regret.
It can move us toward finding peace with things that are beyond our external control. It’s balancing. It’s healing. It can be an island of calm in the roiling, churning chaos outside and within.

Make this week’s art as chaotic or the opposite as you’d like.

Use some masking tape or artist’s tape to block off the edges of your page, and create a grid.

Then throw down your color, whatever colors you feel in the moment.

In my first layer I created a bit of mud by mixing some acrylics that were complementary. You can be mindful of how things blend. You can let things dry between layers. Or not.

Tap into your emotion. Or just have fun.

Try out different materials.

If you use collage, that’s the time to be mindful of where your taped edges are. Other than that, just enjoy painting, coloring, mark-making. You can use your fingers, paint brushes, crayons, pens, markers.

Don’t think too much about it, just do.

When everything is dry, carefully peel up your tape.

If you have trouble with your tape pulling up your paper, you can try a hairdryer to loosen the adhesive, to see your chaotic, messy art-making resolved into fun little pieces of art.

Feel free to add some frames as I did.

Most importantly, embrace the fresh start of 2024. With color.

Let’s make 2024 a year of nurturing our creative souls.

Enjoy this week’s video, and if you plan to take regular time for creative self-care in the year to come, give it a thumbs-up. Share with someone who needs to reclaim their creativity and be encouraged to practice creative self-care. Subscribe to never miss new creative inspiration and reminders from me to keep a weekly creative self-care date with yourself.

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Click here to sign up for emails that take the prompts a little further and a link to join the private Better With Art Facebook group.

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