Session Four
Hello again! I hope you have enjoyed the sessions so far. Please do send us your thoughts, feedback, what you’d like more of, less of, or anything else. And your drawings! Your lines taken for a walk, or your squiggle games, they don’t have to be in any way expert, we would just love to see what has come out of the suggested activities.
We’ll start with Me Today, as always, then we will move on to a couple of simple activities, and finally something a bit bigger.
You can scroll down the page to follow all the exercises in order, or use the buttons below to jump to particular activity.
Remember, it’s completely fine to adapt the exercises to suit you and what materials you have. The idea is to have fun, and absorb yourself in a creative activity, with no particular desired result – everyone will do them differently. As ever, we’d love to see what you create – please do send in your images to us on Facebook or Twitter, or email them to our art therapist, Rose.
Me Today
We begin with our Me Today exercise. If you haven’t joined us for our previous sessions, Me Today is intended to be a quick snapshot of how you are today – a little sketch, or a scribble, or a doodle, or anything you like. At the end of 8 sessions we will show you how to make all your Me Todays into a small booklet – a record of how life has been for you during these weeks.
We usually suggest taking about 15 minutes for this exercise, but since you are at home, take whatever time feels right to you.
Straight Lines
Find an image you like – in a magazine, on a cereal packet – anything that attracts you. Now take a pen or pencil, a ruler, and a sheet of paper, and copy the image, only using the ruler and pencil, no free drawing.
In the example shown here, I chose the curliest, curviest image I could find, and found it strangely liberating as I went on – at the start I think I was still trying to make curves with lots of straight lines, then started letting go of the curve altogether and enjoying the sharp angles.
It’s an experiment with control, and as with many of these drawing games, the doing of it, and the noticing how you respond to it, is just as important as the final result.
Using both your hands, draw with one hand around the other, on a big piece of paper. You could do this with others in your family, and end up with lots of outlines of different hands, both left and right.
Now decorate the hands – give them watches, nail varnish, rings, veins, scars, tattoos, and anything else you can think of. Are you the kind of person who writes phone numbers, or even shopping lists, on your hand? Put those in too!
Making and Decorating a Folder
This is to keep all your drawings in as the weeks go on, and also a project in itself.
You will need cardboard, perhaps a flattened cardboard box, large enough to give you two pieces big enough to make a folder that can hold A4 paper, or larger if you are going to use bigger paper than that. Better still, large enough to make the whole thing from one piece! Shops often have stacks of boxes, already flattened, or you may have an old ring binder or envelope file at home – these would do fine as they are, decorated and personalised as below.
If you are starting from scratch, though, cut your two pieces of cardboard to size, and join down one long edge. You can do this with a strong sticky tape, or make a cloth hinge, using two strips of cloth, one on the outside, one on the inside, glued over the join. A clever way to do this would be to allow a couple of inches extra at the join, so that your folder can accommodate plenty of your work. Make two holes on the opening edges, and use ribbon or string to make ties for your folder. Now you are ready to decorate it. Make it as personal and colourful as you can – cut out pictures from magazines or catalogues, or use any printed material to hand. Or paint, or crayons, or felt tips – the possibilities are endless. The idea is that you have a folder which is unique to you, with your name clearly on it somewhere.
