Art is everywhere: you don’t need to be a museum curator to acquire a taste for the art that strengthens your mood and sparks creativity. Making art of all forms is clinically proven to lower levels of anxiety while providing a productive output for coping with negative emotions or stress. Simple hobbies such as drawing or watercolor painting can also help fuel inspiration for your home design, giving you fuller control over the decoration that defines your living space while putting your mind at ease.
Creative Forms of Stress Relief
In the past decade, adult coloring books have grown increasingly popular in U.S. bookstores after a study showed that coloring mandalas helped to reduce anxiety. Globally, art and forms of creative expression are a top recommendation for lowering stress productively and safely. Through artistic expression, people can process negative emotions while creating something tangible and meaningful as a visual representation of their healing.
There’s even a clinical basis for learning about your feelings via art: many mental health counsellors now practice art therapy, an approach that combines traditional counseling strategies with simple art exercises. Art therapy is particularly useful for people who struggle to verbalize their emotions into words but need a way to communicate with the world around them.
Simple Drawing Exercises
If you’ve been out of touch with drawing for awhile, you can use simple drawing tutorials to introduce key concepts into your art, such as depth, contrast, and precision. Popular exercises for drawing include learning to draw a human face, the moon, or even something as small as a leaf to hone in your attention to detail. If you still struggle to master the basics, watching sped-up videos of people drawing can give you a sense of the techniques and angles artists use to achieve their desired outcome in a piece. These exercises can help you regain confidence in your abilities and gradually master key elements of design in your sketches. When you’re feeling more adept, you can also try acrylic paintings on canvas to further hone your skills.
Incorporating DIY Art Into Your Home Design
Once you begin making art that helps your mood, you can turn your creative output into an excellent resource for home decoration. You can use adhesive strips or photo frames to mount your artwork to the walls of your home, or start by making mood boards that reflect a certain feeling that you’ve been mulling over lately. Most mood boards revolve around a specific theme or idea, which make them good staple additions to your home based on what sort of aesthetic you’re aiming for in each room. Art is also a great way to travel: you can plan your vacations around seeing the best museums and galleries in an area, allowing you to gain a sense of cultural and artistic values as you explore new communities
Over time, you will find that your artistic sensibility develops so that you have a sharper instinct for what styles, pieces, etc. best suit you at any given moment. The results are truly transformational: leading to a stress-busting hobby that fuels creative inspiration in all aspects of life.
