ART THERAPY (various techniques).

There are many exercises and techniques of art therapy, but all of them are united by the opportunity to look at your work as in a mirror. The leitmotif of all tasks is your feelings and sensations, your state. Each exercise, removing masks and clamps, returns to the essence, to the roots, to the heart, to the root causes.

1) Art therapy exercise “WORKING WITH THE PAST”.

To complete the exercise, you will need everything that has accumulated in deep drawers and has long lost its value, but that it was a pity to throw it away right away: pieces of paper, fabric, candy wrappers, paper clips, ribbons, old calendar cards and postcards, long-dried felt-tip pens …

We lay out these “treasures” in front of us and take away what we associate with past experience, which it is time to let go a long time ago – resentments, fears, insecurities, anger, disappointments, failures and so on.
Now, from all the selected material, you need to make a general composition. The main thing is not to rush and do what you want, without analyzing anything. The analysis can be started after the completion of the work.
Be sure to thank each symbol for invaluable experience and life lessons. Say thank you to all the situations and people from your past, and say goodbye to your work and, if possible, burn it.

2) Resource exercise: “THE TALE OF THE HERO”.

We need a pen and a blank sheet of paper. We sit down more comfortably. If you want, you can turn on pleasant music. We take a few deep breaths and exhalations, relax and tune in to our inner state. After that, we begin to create a fairy tale. First of all, we determine the Heroine or Hero, the place and time of the action, his / her character traits and lifestyle.

Then follows the beginning, characterized by a change in the usual situation, the occurrence of obstacles or the beginning of a journey.
In the main part of the tale, the Hero finds friends, overcomes all obstacles, copes with all the “dragons” and receives a reward. And in the end, he gains everything he aspired to – experience and knowledge that change the quality of his life for the better.

Having finished writing the fairy tale, we re-read it again and look for our similarity with the Hero, determine at what stage (according to the plot of the fairy tale) we are now, and what can help us overcome difficulties.

3) EXERCISES WITH INK BLOTS.

This series of exercises continues and develops the idea of ​​the famous Rorschach test, only in this case, not standard material is used for analysis, but our own abstractions.

Exercise One

Quite freely, pointlessly moving a pen, pencil or felt-tip pen over a sheet of paper, we draw a complex tangle of lines, we try to “see” a certain image in the “scribbles-paintings” and consciously develop it (we use certain colors, highlight contours, sketch areas). Write a short comment or story.

Exercise two
In a separate notebook or notebook, we start a “doodle diary” and keep it for a certain period of time (a couple of days, a week). We follow the changes in the scribbles and analyze them, and after the end of the “experiment” we write a story based on them.

Exercise three
With sweeping movements of different parts of the body, we create scribbles on a large sheet of whatman paper. For a more “mind-blowing” effect, you can close your eyes. When the “masterpiece” is ready, we find an image in the image and develop it.

4) WORKING WITH CLAY, PLASTILINE, DOUGH AND WAX.

We sculpt our problem in an arbitrary form, “talk” with it, expressing to it absolutely everything that we consider necessary and that is boiling over. Let’s transform it into whatever we want.

We create sculptural images with closed eyes.

We create and paint figures from clay.

We create clay amulets and amulets.

5) COLLAGING is one of the most effective methods of working with a person, which, moreover, does not cause tension, which may be associated with a person’s lack of artistic abilities. Collage helps to determine the psychological state of a person at a given moment in time, to identify his experiences and relevant aspects of self-consciousness, to reveal potential opportunities.
The material for creating a collage can be not only illustrations from magazines, but also natural materials, personal photographs and author’s drawings. Topics are selected depending on the needs of a particular group: “I”, “family”, “body”, “man and woman”, “past-present-future”, etc.
Instruction: select pictures for a given topic and arrange them in a complete composition. You can do absolutely anything with the elements, you can supplement the work with comments and inscriptions, finish drawing the elements, paint over and decorate the voids.

Collage analysis: the size of the elements and their location on the sheet relative to each other, the identification of dominant elements, the reasons for choosing specific elements, the color palette, the plot and orderliness or randomness and fragmentation.

We have presented only a small part of effective art therapy exercises for diagnosis and healing, which open the door to the fascinating world of art therapy.