Creative Life Coaching

From Graduate School to Employment: Sharing My Profession & Advocating for the Field

The Socially Responsible Practitioner

Briana Colton graduated in October with her Master of Arts in Counseling: Art Therapy from Adler University. A Chicago resident, she is blogging for us to chronicle her experiences navigating the transition between graduate school and full-time employment—and to share her progress and insights with the Adler community including current students and fellow graduates.  Today she writes:

When I began looking for a job, one of the first pieces of advice I received from mentors in the field of art therapy focused on finding opportunities to advocate for the field.

One woman suggested, “If you have information on a particular topic that you feel is interesting, write up a description and send it along to your former faculty offering to do a guest lecture.”  Another art therapist I know and respect suggested creating workshop ideas and getting practice providing art therapy experiences to different populations.  A third suggested finding a place to volunteer, to…

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Hidden feelings activity

Art of Social Work

For this activity you just need a paper towel roll and paper (I also use pipe cleaners for the arms and legs).

1) The child makes arms and legs for the cardboard roll and covers the bottom of the roll with paper.

2) Cut two slits on the front, top end of the roll next to each other (this is how the faces are held on the front).

3) Have the child make a variety of feelings faces based on his or her developmental level. Talk about masking feelings and how feelings can be bottled up when they aren’t expressed safely.

4) Take turns telling stories about the character and have the child guess the bottled up emotions.

For example, “Matthew looks really angry today in class. He was yelling at the teacher and won’t talk to his friends. But really he’s thinking about how his grandmother died last year…

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Art and Grace

Where Creativity Works

the first time we met

Service is important to me, so I have been volunteering my time at nursing home that cares for dementia and Alzheimer patients. As a member of Marywood’s art honors society, Zeta Omicron Kappa Pi, I volunteered to participate in activity at the nursing home for community service; the event was “wine and painting.” While we were there we served the participants wine and led them in a painting project. Each one of us worked with one of the participants of the activity. I worked with a wonderful woman, whom we will call “Grace” for confidentiality reasons. Although she has dementia, she is always extremely cheerful. We painted a flower together and she enjoyed the process very much. She cried after our activity because of how happy she was. I asked her if she would like to paint together again and she immediately replied, “Oh…

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Maps of Tenderness Continued*

A new Maps of Tenderness workshop will take place at Alandala Cafe in Bucharest!  In this workshop we will explore how to creatively map the intimate geographies of our lives. Through expressive arts methods and using our hands as starting points, we will trace ways to reaching others, navigating relationships and moving beyond borders.

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Art Journal – Color-blocking

This gallery contains 3 photos.

Originally posted on both sides of the wall:
So, my friend started teaching at a new location for the summer. It will be weekly, though I doubt I can afford every week… Anyway, it’s a shorter time also, so she will be doing less-complex journals, but they are still super fun. This week, we did…

PAINTING: “Light thoughts”

PowArtLine

I was in need of bright colour. And each colour represent the emotions from the moment i was drawing. To me the colours give me the association to how sunlight can play on the surface of water.

x, Olsen

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Latest Obsessions

snailemmail

I’m a very anxious person, and tend to get stuck way too deep inside my head, where nothing but self destructing thoughts lie. I was advised that colouring is a good way of distracting myself, and oh boy was that person right!

I would often just have print outs to colour in, until recently, colouring for grown ups became a thing! Since then, I’ve started a little collection of books; “The Art Therapy Book” by Richard Merritt and Hannah Davies, “The Mindfulness Colouring Book” by Emma Farrarons & finally “Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom.” Amazon at the moment do great value deals for colouring books, my Mum bought me the art therapy and animal kindgom books along with 24 colouring pencils for roughly £12!

For those who are wondering what types of pictures there are to colour in, look no further! 

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Welcome to Madison Art Therapy

Healing Emotional Wounds

Bec Storm

Emotional wounds are often more difficult to recover from than physical wounds or pain. The things that happen to us in our past can continue to stay with us and hurts will often linger until we deal with them. We have to acknowledge our pain clearly and forgive those who have wronged us in order to move on in our lives and find peace.

Some emotional pain can remain hidden and many times I have not realized when things have been there at all. For me, I have always been more comfortable bottling things up and pushing it down, I was never very good at talking about my emotions or being able to express myself when people or situations hurt me deeply. In time, I became so good at it that I didn’t even notice how deeply some things ran myself.

Recently, as I’ve been reading a wide variety…

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