4 DIY Art Therapy Activities For Spring

These DIY spring art therapy activities can be just the boost you need after a long winter. April is finally here, and that means an end to the bitter cold we’ve all been tolerating for the past few months. But waving goodbye to the chill also means accepting the oncoming heat. With winter behind us, and Aries season firmly in view, it’s as good a time as any to pick up your art therapy practice in full force. 

“The beautiful spring came, and when nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.”  

Harriet Jacobs

Make A Mood Board For Your Ideal Spring

What You’ll Need: 

• A large piece of cardboard, poster board, or cork board
• Magazines, catalogs, or printouts of images
• Scissors
• Glue or tape 
• Writing implement 

How To Do It:

A mood board (also known as an intention board) is a simple act of collage that can have big benefits. Take your chosen materials and collage them into an image that represents the things you’d like to see, become, and do this April. 

What You Can Gain  

Creating a springtime moodboard can be a fun and therapeutic activity to help you capture the energy and optimism of the season. As you create your moodboard, take time to reflect on the images you’re choosing to use and the image they create when collaged together. What emotions or thoughts do they evoke? How can you incorporate the themes and ideas into your daily life? Enjoy the process of creating your springtime moodboard, and let it be a reminder to prioritize your mental health and wellbeing during this time of renewal and growth.

Learn How To Press Flowers 

What You’ll Need: 

• A flower. 
• A thick book you don’t mind getting wet. 
• Something very heavy. 

How To Do It: 

Pressing a flower begins with taking a mindful walk. Take a walk through someplace filled with blossoming flowers and pick one you like. When it comes down to it, the act of pressing a flower is very simple, and that’s why it can be so powerful. All it takes is the thoughtfulness to find that flower you like and press it between two pieces of absorbent paper (ideally a big book). Then, you place the book beneath something heavy and forget about it. 

What You Can Gain:

You might question the benefit of pressing a flower then forgetting about it. But that’s the beautiful part. You forget about your pressed flower, leaving it somewhere buried within your home, and then one day, you find it and remember it. If you’ve done it right, been patient, and waited enough time, that flower will look largely the same as the day you plucked it. Spring’s beauty is preserved, and all because you took the time to savor it. 

Channel Your Anger Into A Painting

What You’ll Need: 

• Paint. 
• Canvas. 
• Paintbrush. 
• Anger. 

How To Do It:

Find a quiet, private place where you can work free of self-consciousness, judgment, and distraction. Set up your materials, mindfully choose the colors you’d like to work with, and start painting in bold, broad strokes. Don’t worry about making a specific design, let your feelings guide you where they will. Embrace the physicality of your artistic process, and let your anger express itself in the way you apply your paint to the canvas. Try unorthodox methods of applying your paint like flicking the paint onto the canvas, using your fingers, or using a palette knife to cut angular shapes into your image. When you feel that you’ve expressed the energy that was inside of you onto the canvas, take a step back and process what you’ve made. 

What You Can Gain: 

Aries season has a knack for rousing the anger in all of us, and painting has a powerful way of permitting us to process our deepest feelings. Your painting is a reflection of your thoughts and experiences, so letting go of your attachment to how it “should” look is part of the work. In the heat of the moment, our feelings can be so close to us as to obscure our view of them. By expressing our feelings through art, we can better understand them as an outside observer. 

Make A Poem Out Of Text Messages You’ve Sent

What You’ll Need: 

• Your phone. 
• Regular text conversations with others. 
• A notes app. 

How To Do It: 

A found poem is a form of poetry that takes pre-existing pieces of writing and repurposes them. In the same way that collage pastes together pre-made images to create new ones with new meanings, found poetry allows us to put the words around us into compelling, and often beautiful, new contexts. As human beings with phones and social circles, we have an immense body of writing to pull from when it comes to making found poetry right at our fingertips. Search through your text conversations on your phone, pull particularly meaningful phrases or lines, and copy them into your notes app. Then, once you have a nice pool of texts to work from, start putting them together and seeing what new meanings these words can take on when read together. 

What You Can Gain: Often our text messages are the pieces of writing that we put the least thought into. We cram meaning into them for the sake of convenience, but we do it almost entirely subconsciously. So by repurposing this almost disposable form of writing into a mindful discipline like poetry, it allows us to recontextualize the words we might have otherwise forgotten. What does the way you communicate over text say about you? And how does the way these texts are responded to affect you? By analyzing the way you communicate through the lens of art, it can help you open up your communication in novel and natural ways.

Enjoy our spring art therapy activities? Integrative Counsel proudly offers virtual Art Therapy with Quinn. Quinn uses virtual art therapy to treat individuals with OCD and Anxiety, as well as those undergoing a major life transition or adjustment and are experiencing grief. Click here to schedule your virtual art therapy session!

Sunny Ebsary is an educator, multi-modal artist, and writer specializing in the intersection of myth and mental health. Sunny’s writing walks the line between poetic and logical, giving readers a chance to interface with the mind and imagination. Sunny’s been putting pen to paper since he was a child, writing everything from albums, novels, and plays, to essays, interactive games, and of course, many articles! While studying both psychology and writing, he realized his real passion in life was helping others unlock their creative spark. Whether he’s leading a D&D game, directing a production, or diving deep into the brain, you can be sure Sunny will be ushering you toward finding meaning in your life.