👻🦇☠️🎃 HAPPY HALLOWEEN 🎃☠️🦇👻
Halloween is my favorite holiday! I just love it. It’s fun and spooky and nostalgic and imaginative. In yesterday’s post we looked at scary art to get us in the Halloween mood and today we’re making art inspired by our fears.
Although we’re going to use our fears as inspiration for art, this is not designed to be a distressing activity; it’s not an exercise in exposure therapy. Please do not force yourself to work with fears that are overwhelming or will cause harm. Be nice to yourself 🧡🖤
Art Can Help Us Cope with Fears
Art alone can’t help us overcome our fears; it isn’t a magical fix. But creativity often makes things better and promotes healing! Here are some of the ways art can help us cope with our fears:
- Art provides a place to process things. Art making requires time and effort, which gives you a chance to think through fears in a safe way.
- Art makes things a little more manageable. Art making can be meditative and calming, and confronting your fears through art can make them less scary.
- Art gives other people a chance to help you. Creating and sharing art is vulnerable and allows others to see and understand us.
- Art creates community. Art gives us the opportunity to know people and relate to them.
Different Ways to Represent Fear in Art
There are so many ways to represent fear in art! There’s no right or wrong way to do this, so try not to stress about it, ok? Let’s have fun 🙂 Each bullet point is a different way to represent your fear through art and you can use any artistic medium- crayons, paint, clay, papier-mâché, embroidery, etc.- to make art.
Each bullet point is a different way to think about your fear and a strategy for making art. As we discuss different strategies for making art about fear, we’ll use the example of the common fear: heights.
- Story: What is the context of this fear? Create a work of art that shows the beginning, middle, and end of a fearful situation, like someone walking to the top of the mountain, looking over the edge, and walking back down.
- Subject: Who experiences this fear? Paint a self-portrait of yourself on a tall ladder.
- Point of View: What do you see in this moment? Show what you see when looking down from on top of a roller coaster.
- Action: What is happening when this fear occurs? Draw someone looking over a ledge.
- Cause and/or Consequence: What happens before and after this fear? Show someone tripping. Show someone sitting in a hospital with a broken leg.
- Color: What color do you associate with this fear? Cover the canvas with different shades of blue and black to represent losing consciousness because heights make you feel like passing out.
- Feeling: How does this emotion feel in your body? Draw shaky, uneven lines because heights make your knees feel weak.
- Words: What words flash through your brain when you experience or think about this fear? Write these words all over your art to emphasize the space they take up in your mind.
- Medium: How can materials demonstrate your fear? Drop paint from different heights to show how the difference in splatters.
- Adjacent Emotion: What else is happening? You feel dizzy when you’re up too high, so (safely) spin around a bit and try painting.