Grumpy Art: Drawing to Process Emotions

1. Class Trailer: Hi. I'm Christine Nishiyama, artist and founder of Might Could Studios. I'm a bookmaker, essay writer, and sketchbooker, but I'm also a big grump, and a scared cat, and a cry baby. You know what, I'm okay with admitting that. Because through years of depression, therapy, reading, and studying, I've finally accepted the idea that the only way to deal with our emotions is to allow ourselves to feel them. As an artist, I've found that drawing is the most powerful way for me to feel and experience my emotions. Some people recommend therapy, exercise, or meditation, and that's all well and good, but the amazing thing about drawing is that it allows me to literally see my emotions. After drawing, I can see this abstract, ambiguous feeling in a concrete tangible way. Seeing the emotion right there in front of my eyes allows me to move from a state of unconscious feeling into a state of conscious understanding. Once we can understand our emotions, we can then begin to really unpack them and choose how we want to respond to them. In this class, I'm going to take you through four emotions; anger, fear, sadness and hopelessness, and show you my own personal drawing method that I use to experience and process each of those emotions. I've broken down each method into concrete steps and even given them their own fancy names. When I'm mad, I draw angry animal robots. When I'm anxious, I draw scaredy -cat rugs. When I'm sad, I draw me and my blobbies. When I'm hopeless, I draw wonky spirals. For each emotion, I'll walk you through four sections. How we feel it with some brief research on the emotion and my own experiences with it. How to draw it with insights I've learned about drawing while in the midst of each emotion. The drawing method with a step-by-step video walk-through showing you a recent real-life example. The aftermath, what happens during and after the drawing and why it works. For the class project, I'll ask you to consider how you're feeling right now and choose the drawing method that most fits your mood. You can post your artwork from the class in the project gallery, and I welcome you to write about any experiences you feel comfortable exploring. I share some personal experiences in this class, and I'm happy to be able to offer you a safe space to share your own emotions as well. Sharing and connection is an important part of emotional well-being, and our art can be a way to cultivate both. Drawing allows me to take something difficult and painful and make meaning and art from it. I hope that this class can help you do that through drawing too. So come on fellow grumps, let's make some grumpy art. 2. Processing Emotions with Art: Processing emotions with art. Now let's dive right in. There are a few ideas that I want to lay out before we begin with our first emotion; why drawing emotions works? Emotions are confusing, and if we're not aware of them, they can easily take over and start steering the ship. We often try to ignore or repress our emotions, but it never really works. The emotions are still there. And then when we fail to get rid of the emotion, we now have new secondary emotions like guilt or shame added on top of whatever we initially tried to ignore. Instead of solving the problem, it makes a bigger mess. Through years of depression, therapy, reading, and studying, I've finally realized and accepted the notion the only way to deal with our emotions is to allow ourselves to feel them. The Tibetan Buddhists, Chogyam Trungpa says it best, if one actually feels the living quality, the texture of the emotions as they are in their naked state, automatically, one begins to see the simultaneously ironical and profound aspect of the emotions as they are. Then the process of transmutation, that is, transmuting the emotions into wisdom takes place automatically. The problem is that we never experience emotions properly. Okay, it makes sense, but how do we actually do that? How do we allow ourselves to actually feel and experience our emotions? A Buddhist might tell you to meditate, a therapist might tell you to sign up for talk therapy, and a runner might tell you to run. Those things are all good and helpful. But I'm an artist and I found that drawing is the most powerful way for me to experience my emotions. Amazingly and different from those other recommendations, drawing allows me to literally see my abstract, ambiguous feelings in a concrete, tangible way. When I start drawing, I often have no idea why I'm feeling the way I do. Why am I so mad? What am I so afraid of? What's making me so sad? But as I draw, my thoughts and feelings subconsciously slip out onto the page, they become visible. Seeing the emotion right there in front of my eyes allows me to move from a state of unconscious feeling into a conscious state of understanding. As Trungpa said, it's much easier to see the wisdom of our emotions once we've actually experienced it. We can then begin to unpack our feelings and choose how we want it to respond to them. Why do we have emotions? Making art is the surest path to connecting to my inner thoughts and listening to what my emotions are trying to tell me. That's important because we have emotions for a reason. They're always trying to tell us something. The Harvard psychologist Susan David says, emotions signal rewards and dangers. They point us in the direction of our hurt. They can be beacons, not barriers, helping us identify what we most care about, and motivating us to make positive changes. If we're unable to see and listen to our emotions, we're flying blind. We're disconnected from the inner part of us and from others around us as well. We're more likely to lash out, withdraw, self-medicate, or shutdown. But by recognizing how we're feeling through drawing, we can become more self aware and make meaning and art from our struggles. Becoming more self-aware. When we're in the midst of intense emotion, be it anger, fear, or sadness, it's incredibly difficult to understand what's going on in our minds and share that experience with others. We often don't even realize that we're angry, scared, or sad. So how could we possibly reach out to others for help and connection or begin to heal if we aren't even aware of how we're actually feeling? How could we voice or put words to an unknown feeling? Drawing gives us the power to communicate first with ourselves. The act of drawing gives a voice to our inner thoughts and forces us to remain open, still, and quiet enough to listen to it. Once we've heard what it has to say, we're more able to communicate and connect with others about how we're truly feeling. There will always be periods in our life of struggle and pain. It's just part of being human. But instead of trying to ignore or get rid of the pain, we can draw to see our pain, listen to it, learn from it, and make art from it. 3. Anger: Anger. Now let's jump into our first emotion, anger, how we feel it. According to the psychologist Paul Ekman, we get angry when we are blocked from pursuing a goal and or treated unfairly. Now before you go skipping this video because you think you're not an angry person remember that all emotions can be felt in different intensities. The basic emotion of anger can be broken down into different emotional states that as the psychologists Charles Spielberg says, from mild irritation or annoyance to fury and rage. Perhaps when you first thought of anger, you visualized rage and that doesn't resonate with you. Fair enough, but let's be real, all of us get annoyed and irritated, so learning to process anger is something that's relevant to everyone. Anger almost always involves another person, we believe someone else has thrown this unfair situation onto us, someone else is to blame. The researcher, Brene Brown also describes anger as an action emotion. We want to do something when we feel it. Part of the reason we're hesitant to admit we get angry sometimes is that anger is uncomfortable. Brene Brown writes in her book, Brave in the Wilderness, "Sometimes owning our pain and bearing witness to struggle means getting angry. When we deny ourselves the right to be angry would deny our pain. There are a lot of coded shame messages in the rhetoric of why so hostile? Don't get hysterical. I'm sensing so much anger and don't take it so personally." All of these responses are normally code for your emotion or opinion is making me uncomfortable. Brown also compares anger to an indicator light in our car that tells us to pull over and check things out. Anger is a normal, natural emotion and there's nothing inherently wrong with feeling angry, we all do from time to time. Instead of ignoring or suppressing our anger, we can start seeing it as an indicator that we need to draw. We need to allow ourselves to experience the anger and listen to what it is trying to tell us. Because anger is an action emotion, we feel the urge to do something about it. We weren't to argue insult, call names, maybe even scream out loud. We want to be passive aggressive, brood alone or just try to push it down. Drawing through the anger helps us feel and experience the emotion in a safe, healthy, and helpful way. Drawing our anger cools us down so that we can be more present, aware, and able to choose how we want to react. How to draw it. Now that we understand a little bit more about anger and what it feels like, let's dive into how to draw when we're angry. As I said in the introduction, we don't always realize what emotion we're feeling. For me, anger is especially this way, I often just feel a vague sense of upset or tension and don't recognize that I'm irritated right away. In moments like that, it's helpful for me to sit down at my desk and take a moment to think. If I were to draw, how would I want to draw? What way of drawing do I feel pulled towards? What way of drawing feels doable in this moment? When dealing with anger, I've discovered a few specific answers to these questions. First, when I'm angry, I feel a desire to draw details. I think this stems from a need to distract myself from swirling angry thoughts. Drawing lots of small details keeps my hand busy while giving my mind a stream of tiny arbitrary decisions to make. This allows my mind to take a break from brooding about whatever injustice I think has been done to me. It helps me climb down a few rungs on the intensity ladder and calm down a bit. Second, when I'm angry, I feel the desire to draw mechanical armor. Anger is an action emotion, meaning we feel the urge to take action often against the person we blame for throwing this unfair situation onto us. We want to defend ourselves and protect ourselves against the perceived enemy. Drawing armor and the like allows me to feel that I am taking action without actually lashing out at another person. With those two insights in mind, I've developed my own method of drying that allows me to experience and process my emotions, and I call it Angry Animal Robot Drawings. Drawing angry animal robots. To show you how and why drawing angry animal robots helps me process my anger, I'm going to break down a drawing that I created recently when I was feeling angry. For context, I became irritated during a conversation with my husband when we were discussing how difficult January had been with all the school snow days, quarantine days, etc. His intention was to be helpful and supportive, but I interpreted his suggestions differently and became angry, annoyed, frustrated, and defensive. After hitting an impasse with the conversation, I took to my iPad to draw an angry animal robot. Step 1, sketch yourself as a cute little animal. Why? Underneath all the anger, we usually feel vulnerable and exposed. Step 2, sketch a robot shell around your animal. Tip search mecca for inspiration. Why? Anger makes us want to act and defend ourselves against the person we blame. Drawing a huge exoskeleton helps us feel we are taking action and protecting ourselves. Step 3, draw any weapons you like. Why? Let's be honest. Sometimes when we're angry, we want to do more than just protect ourselves. We want to attack. Step 4, draw your animal's facial expression. Why? This helps us see what intensity of anchor we're feeling. Trying out different expressions on the animal feels like trying them on ourselves. Step 5, draw details on the robot: buttons, plates, wire, spikes, hinges, etc. Why? By now we are feeling a little calmer. Getting lost and inconsequential details allows our mind to wander and consider the situation at hand more deeply. Step 6, ink your drawing, tip, if drawing on paper, ink over your pencil sketch with a pen or 6B pencil. If drawing digitally, reduce the transparency of your sketch, then ink over it with a darker brush. Why? Like drawing in details, inking can be fairly mindless, allowing our mind to focus on other things, such as why we got so angry and what's really going on. Step 7, quickly choose a color palette for your robot. Why? Choosing colors now requires our mind to make some decisions, again, giving us a break from thinking about how we feel. Step 8, color in the drawing. Why? Finally, coloring allows us another chance to think about how we were wronged. Usually, by now my anger has been expressed and I'm able to think clearly and choose how I want it to react. The aftermath. Drawing an angry animal robot is not a magic spell. It doesn't make difficult situations and emotions go away, but that's not the point. The goal of drawing our anger is to help us experience and express our anger, so we can then consciously choose how we want to react. Before I drew my automatic response to my anger, it was to dispute what was being said, defend myself, and withdraw from the whole thing. After some time drawing, I was able to better communicate to my husband how and why I was feeling angry. Communicating how and why we feel the way we do leads to more listening, more sharing, and more connection. Ultimately, it's that connection that makes the anger lift. Connecting with ourselves through drawing and then connecting with others through sharing and listening. Final thoughts on drawing anger. I'm glad I've been able to analyze and distill this drawing technique down into a relatively simple process that I can turn to again and again. It makes it easier for me to recognize when I'm angry and make sitting down to draw at that moment more approachable because now I know exactly what to draw angry animal robots. It also doesn't hurt that in the end, an angry bunny and a robot suit is pretty silly. This helps alleviate the seriousness and intensity that can build up when we're angry, and reminds us that in the grand scheme of things, many of our struggles are not nearly as big and important as we think they are. After drawing through my anger, I find it easy to zoom out beyond myself and think about the situation within a larger context. We all get angry sometimes, and that's okay, but I hope the next time we feel angry, instead of lashing out or shutting down, we can take a moment to draw angry animal robots about it. Then we can truly feel our anger, see it, experience it, process it, and move on to reacting in a healthy and helpful way. 4. Fear: Fear. Now let's explore how I use drawing to experience and process fear. How we feel it. The psychologist, Paul Ekman, defines fear this way. Fear arises with the threat of harm, either physical, emotional, or psychological, real or imagined. Like anger, many people believe fear is not a big part of their emotional life. You might imagine situations like a huge bear growling at you, or someone breaking into your home. But fear, like all emotions, pop up in a range of intensities and states. Perhaps terror and horror don't resonate with you right now. But I'm willing to bet you feel nervous or anxious pretty often. As artists, we have our own specific fears. Fear of the blank page, fear of imperfection, and imposter syndrome. At any given moment, we are all probably a little anxious about something. Anxiety, how intensely we feel fear is determined by whether we believe we're able to cope with a threat or not. The more helpless we feel, the more fearful we feel. This is where anxiety comes in. Perhaps the threat that led to our fear is not actually life-threatening. Thankfully, most instances are not. Maybe we're anxious about our job, and the unfinished art project on our desk and the ever expanding to-do list and all the things we know we're supposed to do today, but don't have time to do and it's that piling up and the uncertainty that we will be able to handle it that leads to the anxiety. Similar to our belief of whether we can cope with something, our level of tolerance also determines how we experience fear and anxiety. But whether we feel that often or not, intensely or not, we tend to respond to anxiety in one of two ways. Worrying or avoiding. I'm an avoider. I've written previously about how I'm a bona fide scaredy-cat, but I'm not generally a warrior. For me, my coping mechanism for anxiety is not worrying, it's avoiding. If I'm scared of something, my instinct is to go in the opposite direction. But if I said no to everything I was scared of, everything I wasn't perfectly prepared for, plan for a known, then I wouldn't ever do anything. Because the truth is, I'm afraid of everything. Everything is scary. All that fear has now increased tenfold since having a child, because a two-year-old doesn't understand that cars, electrical sockets, whole grapes, and hot dogs are all very dangerous. I think most of us don't like admitting that fear is part of our lives or that sometimes we're afraid. It makes us feel weak and vulnerable. Being called a scaredy-cat is not a compliment, but everyone feels afraid, nervous, and anxious from time to time. Although our instinctual reaction to a threat may be to worry in circles or runaway, we do have the ability to pause and choose how we want to respond to our fear. If we can allow ourselves to recognize when we feel fear, experience it, and accept it, then we can consciously choose how we want to react. We can listen to what our fear is trying to say and either take its wise advice to avoid something dangerous, or choose to push through the fear and open ourselves up to uncertainty and risk. Both are correct responses in different situations. The only way to know which response is right is to listen to the fear and understand what we are afraid of and why. That's where our drawing comes in. How to draw it. Now that we understand a little bit more about fear and what it feels like, let's dive into how to draw when we're afraid. As I've said before, we're not always able to immediately recognize what emotion we're feeling. For me, it's a little more straightforward to know when I'm feeling nervous or anxious compared to other emotions. But either way, when I'm feeling an intense emotion, I tried to take a moment to sit down at my desk and think. If I were to draw right now, how would I want to draw? What way of drawing do I feel pulled towards? What way of drawing feels doable in this moment? With fear, I've discovered a couple of specific answers to those questions. By the way, I'm going to use the word nervous here to refer to fear. Because I'm not really recommending that you sit down and draw if you're in the midst of an actually life-threatening situation. First, when I'm nervous, I feel a desire to draw details. This is also true when I'm angry and the reasons are similar. When we're caught up in worry and anxiety, we tend to be stuck up in our head thinking intense swirling thoughts that just won't let go. I need something to distract my hands and mind, something to pull them away and loosen my thoughts a bit. Getting lost in drawing details encourages me to calm down and recognize that I'm not in danger as anxiety sometimes makes us feel. Second, when I'm nervous, I feel the desire to draw patterns and designs. Fear is interesting because we don't want to be drawn into it. With anger and sadness, I think a part of us wants to be drawn further into the emotion, whether it's good for us or not. But most of the time we don't want to be pulled into fear. The idea of fear makes us feel weak and vulnerable. Instead of drawing into the emotion, as I recommend doing with the others, I prefer to draw out of the emotion. For me that has evolved into drawing patterns and designs. Sometimes I draw a textile designs like rugs, and sometimes I draw symmetrical patterns like mandalas. The symmetry and repeating patterns structures are extremely calming to me and give me a path to follow. The lack of character design makes the drawing feel more approachable and doable at that moment. There's less fear of getting it right because an abstract drawing, there's really not a right or wrong. With those two insights in mind, I've developed my own method of drawing that allows me to experience and process my fear, and I call it scaredy-cat rugs. Drawing scaredy-cat rugs. To show you how and why drawing scaredy-cat rugs helps me process my fear, I'm going to break down this drawing that I created recently when I was feeling anxious. For context. In late December, I had a miscarriage. It was awful and was immediately followed by a series of snow days, COVID exposures, and school quarantines. That meant my two-year-old daughter was only in school for about five days in all of January. This led me to have very little alone time to process the miscarriage, make art, or work. As you might imagine, I became anxious about all of that, and my belief that I could handle it all was quickly diminishing. Eventually, I recognized what was happening and that I was feeling fear. I knew I was afraid of getting pregnant again, but I was also feeling some other broader fears that I needed to understand better. So I took to my iPad to draw a scaredy-cat rug. Step 1, draw the basic structure of your rug design. Why? This base gives us a simple framework to start filling in. Step 2, start adding details in the center of the rug. Tip, search textile design for inspiration. Why? Fear makes us feel frozen? Starting in the center helps us feel more centered. Step 3, continue filling in details. Why? Now we are calmer and our mind can wonder and consider the threat at hand more deeply. Step 4, draw more details. Why? Getting into the zone allows our minds to focus on other things, such as what we are afraid of. Is it just one thing or more? Step 5, quickly choose a color palette. Why? Choosing colors requires our mind to make some decisions, again, giving us a break from thinking about our fear. Step 6, color in your design. Why? Coloring allows us another chance for our mind to wander and think about why we feel afraid. Step 7, add final details. Why? Usually by now my fear has been seen in expressed and I'm able to think more clearly and choose how I want to react. The aftermath. Drawing this scaredy-cat rug is not a magical spell. It doesn't make difficult situations and emotions go away. But that's not the point. The goal of drawing our fear is to help us experience and express that fear so then we can consciously choose how we want to act. Before I drew my automatic response to my fear was to avoid. I was afraid of getting pregnant again and losing the baby again. I secretly start thinking about never trying again. It'll be too scary. I also realized while drawing that I was afraid of telling people I had miscarried. I was nervous about what to say and anxious about what they would say. I was avoiding people and avoiding those conversations. After drawing my scaredy-cat rug, I was better able to see the fear and understand what I was afraid of. Once I allowed myself to spend some time with it, feeling that fear while drawing, it was much easier to accept it and decide how to move forward. I realized that I do want to attempt to get pregnant again, even though I know it will be scary. I also realized that I would have to tell people who knew I was pregnant that I had miscarried at some point. But also remember that those are close friends and family and loving, carrying people and they would of course be loving and caring when I opened up to them as well. Surprisingly, I also discovered a desire to share my miscarriage experience through my writing too, which would require me to push past my fear and really open up myself to the unknown. Ultimately, that feeling of courage is what makes the fear lift. Knowing that I have listened to the fear, considered it, and decided for myself how I want to move forward. Final thoughts in drawing fear. I'm glad I've been able to analyze and distill this drawing technique down into a relatively simple process that I can return to again and again. It makes it easier for me to recognize when I'm nervous or anxious, and makes sitting down to draw at that moment more approachable. Because now I know exactly what to draw, a scaredy-cat rug. We all get nervous, anxious, and afraid sometimes and that's okay. But I hope the next time we feel afraid, instead of worrying endlessly or avoiding constantly, we can take a moment to dress scaredy-cat rubs about it. Then we can truly feel our fear, see it, experience it, process it, and move on to reacting to it in a healthy and helpful way. 5. Sadness: Sadness. Now, let's sync into sadness, how we feel it. The psychologist Paul Ekman says, the universal trigger for sadness is the loss of a valued person or object. We all have experience with loss. Sadness emerges after big losses, such as a death of a loved one or rejection by a partner. But it also arises out of more abstract losses, such as a move, a job change, or a goodbye, and sadness appears in the wake of even more ambiguous losses, such as loss of identity, purpose, and expected outcome. Sadness comes in varying states of intensity depending on the level of loss. We have all felt disappointed, discouraged, or distraught at times. Most of us have also experienced the more intense states of sadness, hopelessness, resignation, despair, and even anguish. Coping with sadness. When faced with a loss and its ensuing sadness, we often try to cope with one of the following methods, withdrawing, ruminating, or self-medicating. But while those techniques might initially work by distracting us from the present moment, they end up prolonging our pain and suffering in the long term. If it's not processed and coped with, sadness can lead to loneliness, disconnection, and ultimately depression. When we fall into sadness, we often back ourselves into a state of self-preservation. We need to connect with others, but our instinct to protect ourselves takes over. So instead of reaching out and getting support, we lock ourselves down, isolate, and numb. Though that may all sound pretty dark, sadness is not a negative emotion. Researchers believe that the purpose of sadness is to encourage us to re-evaluate our lives and make changes after a loss. It's also a signifier that we need help and support from others, and when processed, cultivates compassion and empathy for ourselves and others. Sadness in art and music. I believe sadness is the emotion most closely tied to art, both art making and art consumption. It's possible that's because I believe sadness is also the emotion that I struggle with the most. I have major depression and have been on and off medication for it and in and out of therapy for it. But I know that the emotion of sadness itself is not the problem. When I successfully process and cope with my sadness, it becomes a pathway to feeling more connected with myself and others. Feeling sad reminds us that we are human and that suffering is part of being human, that we are not alone. Perhaps that's why we are collectively drawn to sad art. There's something astounding about seeing a painting, watching a movie, or hearing a song that perfectly captures how you feel when sadness haunts you. Art can do that with other emotions sure. A song can feel happy or angry. But there's something visceral about a sad song or a sad movie. Somehow it digs deeper into our hearts. Take for example, the song, The Sixth Station composed by Joe Hisaishi for the Miyazaki movie, Spirited Away. Take a listen. Doesn't that song make your chest ache, and yet it's beautiful? I want to listen to it. Perhaps the reason we're drawn to sad music and movies is not that it makes us feel sad because who actually wants that, but because we know the artwork was created by an artist, a person who has felt the way we have. For an artist to create something that can tap so precisely into our heart, they must have been where we've been. They must have felt the sadness that we have felt, and as their artwork is evidence they made it out of that dark hole. They were able to sit in their sadness, feel it, and process it and transform it into something new. They took the feeling they were feeling and pulled it out of themselves. Not to get rid of it, but as a way of embracing and sharing it with others as a tangible piece of art. It's one of the most powerful things there is. I've arrived at the same point, I've come to with all the other emotions in this class. If we can recognize when we feel sadness and allow ourselves to fully experience it and accept it, then we can consciously choose how we want to react. We can listen to our sadness as it tries to show us what we've lost and what we value. Rather than locking ourselves down, we can allow sadness to open us up, to accept changes in our lives and cultivate a deeper connection to the humanity inside ourselves and others, and so that's where drawing our sadness comes in. How to draw it. Now that we have more of a grasp on sadness and what it feels like, let's explore how to draw when we're sad. When I'm feeling emotional, I like to take a moment to sit down at my desk and think, if I were to draw right now, how would I want to draw? What way of drawing would I feel pulled towards? What way of drawing feels doable in this moment? With sadness, I've discovered a couple of specific answers to those questions. First, when I'm sad, I feel a desire to draw myself. In the other emotions I've covered, my drawings were not direct depictions of myself, but in sadness, I feel pulled to draw myself. This may be a form of personalization, the belief that I am the problem, the one to be blamed for the situation, the loss, and the sadness. It seems drawing myself helps alleviate that blame as it usually ends up making me feel a little bit lighter and more at peace. Perhaps seeing myself on the page as a character allows me to see myself with more self-compassion or empathy as if I were someone else. So the process of drawing myself and seeing myself visibly on the page is a powerful way to get out of a downward spiral. Second, when I'm sad, I feel a desire to draw my darkness. Everyone has darkness inside them, negative thoughts, harmful beliefs and that mean inner voice. It's that darkness that pulls us back down deeper into sadness. Some people call them inner demons, but that feels too harsh to me. I've come to realize that darkness is just part of human life, and it doesn't have to be a scary demon that we run away from. To me it's more helpful to see these things as something we have to learn to live with. So instead, I call them blobbies. When I'm feeling sad or depressed, drawing those blobbies brings them out of the darkness and into the light, out of my head and onto the page. Drawing those dark thoughts and feelings as little blobby creatures transforms them from intense and debilitating beliefs into something more approachable and almost silly. It makes them feel a lot more manageable. With those two insights in mind, I've developed my own method of drawing that allows me to experience and process my sadness, and I call it me and my blobbies. Drawing me and my blobbies. To show you how and why drawing me and my blobbies helps me process my sadness, I'm going to break down this drawing that I created recently when I was feeling sad. A relevant side note. We also made the regretful decision of moving our daughter into her toddler bed in early January, and the transition was not easy, more crying and less sleep. It felt like COVID and everything else would never end. After saying the ambiguous, I'm overwhelmed for weeks, I finally realized I was sad, and so I took to my iPad to draw me and my blobbies. Step 1, draw yourself. Why? The act of drawing our feelings forces us to reflect and recognize how we are actually feeling. Step 2, draw something in front of you. Tip, be open and non-judgmental and draw the first thing you think of. Why? Sadness is caused by the loss of a person, object, or outcome. How might the thing you drew represent a recent loss you experienced? Step 3, draw your blobbies. Why? Sadness can make us feel hopeless and stuck, but we are not our thoughts. Drawing our dark thoughts as Blobbies can help separate them from us. Step 4, color in your drawing. Why? Coloring allows our mind to wonder a bit more loosely. How could you interpret what you've drawn? What could it mean? Step 5, add any patterns and details. Why? Patterns give us another chance to think about our loss. Usually by now my sadness has been expressed and I'm more able to recognize what I need. The aftermath. Drawing me and my blobbies is not a magic spell and doesn't make difficult situations and emotions go away. But that's not the point. The goal of drawing our sadness is to help us experience and express that sadness, so we can then consciously choose how we want to react. Before I drew, my automatic response to my sadness was to deny and withdraw. My family is healthy and I'm fortunate to have a flexible job allowing me to care for my daughter when she's not in school. I'm also lucky that she's a joy to be around. Though, like any two-year-old, she has her meltdowns. So the thought becomes, what do I have to be sad about? That denial of our sadness is a dangerous game. There are levels of loss and levels of sadness. But just because your current sadness is maybe not as intense as someone else's, does not change the fact that you are sad. Criticizing, blaming, and shaming ourselves for our sadness only leads to more pain. That's where I was at, denying my sadness and withdrawing from everything. After drawing me and my blobbies, I was better able to see my sadness and accept it. Once I allowed myself to spend some time with it, feeling that sadness while drawing, it was much easier to accept it and decide how to move forward. I realized that I had lost the expectation of time to relax and process the difficult events of the holidays, and from there I was able to see my negative thought patterns and adopt healthier and more helpful thoughts. I was able to remind myself that this was most likely the peak of Omicron and that my daughter would soon be able to go back to school. Now that I knew exactly what I had lost, I recognize that I could actually make changes in my life to address the issue. Here and there, I was able to carve out chunks of alone time for myself, even with a two-year-old at home. After I had accepted and adapted, I was able to reach out to others. I set up a date night with my husband and we vented about how difficult January was. I set up a virtual Zoom call with some artists friends to draw and talk together. Over sketchbooks and cups of tea, we shared all that we were struggling with. Those moments of connections didn't alleviate all of my sadness or make all of my problems go away, but they reminded me that I'm not alone and that right now many of us are struggling with COVID, parenting, and getting time to ourselves, and ultimately that feeling of connection is what makes the sadness lift. Knowing that I have listened to the sadness, realized what was lost, accepted the sadness, and taken actions to adapt to the loss. Final thoughts on drawing sadness. I'm glad I've been able to analyze and distill this drawing technique down into a relatively simple process that I can return to again and again. It makes it easier for me to recognize when I'm sad. It makes sitting down to draw at that moment more approachable, because now I know exactly what to draw, me and my blobbies. We all suffer losses and feel sad sometimes, and that's okay. But I hope the next time we feel sad, instead of withdrawing or ruminating, we can take a moment to draw me and my blobbies about it, then we can truly feel our sadness, see it, experience it, process it, and move on to reacting to it in a healthy and helpful way. 6. Hopelessness (and Hope): Hope: So far in this class, I've covered three emotions: Anger, fear, and sadness. We've seen that these emotions are natural, important, and even beneficial so long as we're able to process and cope with them. But the question remains, why are we sometimes not able to cope with our emotions? Sometimes our emotions are just too intense, too real, and too all encompassing. Isolated bursts of annoyance can snowball into a full-blown anger problem. Everyday worries can balloon into debilitating anxiety and moments of sadness can ooze into aching depression. We know that emotions themselves are not the issue. Why do we struggle to cope with them so much? What makes an emotion healthy versus harmful? When do emotions become dangerous? Hopelessness: How we feel it? I now believe that there's a key turning point that determines whether an emotion has become dangerous. It's when we begin to believe that things are hopeless. It's natural to feel angry when we're slighted, it's normal to feel afraid when we're threatened, and it's expected to feel sad after a loss. But if we begin to feel hopeless, if we believe that there's no way out and no end to how we are feeling that is when an emotion threatens to steamroll our lives. Hopelessness appears when we're not able to cope with our emotions. When we're not able to voice our side of an injustice, feel safe from a threat or accept changes after a loss. We fall deeper and deeper into the feeling. At some point getting so deeply stuck, we just can't imagine a way out. According to Bernie Brown, hopelessness arises out of a combination of negative life events and negative thought patterns particularly self-blame and the perceived inability to change our circumstances. When extreme hopelessness seeps into all the corners of our lives and combines with extreme sadness, we feel despair. When an emotion sinks down into hopelessness, it becomes more intense, more persistent, and more pervasive. Perhaps our sadness was kindled following a grandmother's death. But if we are unable to cope with that sadness, hopelessness ignites. We are now sad about seemingly everything ever and nothing at all. We're no longer able to pinpoint why we are sad. All we know is that we are very sad and it feels like will always be this way. Hopelessness then causes our emotions to interfere with our ability to live our daily lives. Even the most simple of tasks like taking a shower, begin to feel too much. It takes too much energy. It's not worth the trouble. We feel alone, apathetic, lethargic, powerless, and stuck. Unfortunately, in hopeless moments like that it's intensely difficult to sit down to draw. Even when we know it will help us. We are missing a key element. Most people think we need happiness to negate sadness, fear, or anger. They search and search for happiness. But we can't process an emotion by feeling another emotion. What we actually need is hope. Hope: How we feel it. The Britannica Dictionary defines hope as the feeling of wanting something to happen and thinking that it could happen. When we have hope, we have something to look forward to. We're able to dream and imagine possibilities and pathways forward even in the face of challenges. But according to emotion researchers, hope is not an emotion. It's not something that just happens to us. Hope is a way of thinking and it's something we can cultivate ourselves. According to researchers CR Snyder and Bernie Brown, hope is a combination of setting goals, having the tenacity and perseverance to pursue them, and believing in our own abilities. The concept that hope is a mindset we can develop is in itself hopeful. Because emotions often barge into our minds subconsciously. We don't choose to be angry, afraid, or sad. But a mindset is something we can actively build ourselves. Hope as a way of thinking is within our control and something we can train our minds to do. Cultivating hope: Building a hopeful mindset requires a tolerance for disappointment, perseverance, and the belief that we can handle challenges. It may seem paradoxical, but our struggle is actually a prerequisite to building up our tolerance, perseverance, and belief in ourselves. I can see in my own life that the more I've struggled, the more resilience I've developed. We develop hope, not in spite of, but because of our struggles. We learn how to hope throughout our lives with every challenge we encounter. We know that hope helps us struggle, struggle helps us hope, and drawing helps us process emotions. But when we feel hopeless, those insights seem untrue and sitting down to draw feels impossibly hard. How do we tap back into hope as artists? Where do we begin when even drawing feels hopeless? Hope: How to draw it. We can start in the now, in the present moment. Anger and sadness suck us into the past and fear and hopelessness fling us into the future. We can find hope here in the present moment. When we feel hopeless, the other drawing methods from this class will also feel hopeless. We've grown too angry, too scared, too sad, and too hopeless and now those methods feel completely unapproachable. In times of hopelessness, we need to pull ourselves back to the present where we can again feel hope. I've been studying and practicing Buddhism for a little while now. But the active sitting meditation has never quite clicked with me. I thought this was a fault or a failure of mine, something I needed to power through or overcome until I found the enso. In Zen Buddhism, the enso is a hand painted circle, typically created in one fluid brushstroke. The enso has been used by Zen masters as a meditation aid and creative spiritual practice for centuries. I've since learned that there are many different ways of meditating. Sitting, walking, lying down, making sand mondelez. Yes, even drawing and painting. The enso has many interpretations and symbolizes different things to different people, including the circle of life, the connectedness of the universe, and a visualization of enlightenment. The enso embodies the Buddhist concept of no mind. A person in a state of no mind is released from emotions and thoughts, bringing them back into the present moment. That quiet awareness gives us a break from the constant inner chatter of our mind. Drawing an enso is a visual aid and concrete practice to come back to the now. It's also rooted in wabi-sabi, the Japanese belief in the beauty of imperfection. Many people when attempting to draw a circle, want to draw a perfect circle. Perfectly smooth, symmetrical, and proportional. But that is not what the enso is about. The enso is about the creation, the act of drawing the circle. Once the stroke of the circle is drawn, it's not messed with. There's no erasing or fixing. It is what it is. Imperfect, asymmetrical, simple, natural, and inherently graceful. Drawing and appreciating the enso represents letting go of our need for perfection and allowing the present moment to be as it is. Each Zen practitioner draws the enso in their own style. Some are drawn quickly, some slowly, some thick, some thin. Some are open, some are closed. Most are drawn in one stroke, though some are drawn in two. Since learning about the enso, I've developed my own version of it called wonky spirals. A wonky spiral may not lead you to enlightenment. But for me, it carries the spirit of the enso and helps me find a glimmer of hope when all feels lost. Drawing wonky spirals. To show you how and why drawing wonky spirals helps me get back into a more hopeful state. I'm going to break down the drawing above that I created recently when I was feeling hopeless. Step 1, start in the center and begin drawing a spiral. Why? Low pressure. It doesn't matter where on the page you begin. Step 2, continue spiraling out, staying close to each layer before. Why? Drawing a spiral gives us something concrete to focus on, gently bringing us back to the present moment. Step 3, when you feel ready, begin a new spiral. Why? Like the enso, a spiral has a beginning and an end. This practice reminds us that everything comes and goes, nothing lasts forever. Step 4, when you're done, reflect on your spirals. Why? We're letting go of our judgment and need for perfection. We are here now perfectly imperfect. The aftermath. Drawing these spirals quickly brings my mind back to the present moment. It's so easy to get caught up in our emotions and feel they will last forever. To believe that any and all paths out seem futile and hopeless. But the wonky spiral, just like the enso gives my mind something concrete to hold onto while encouraging my mind to return to the here and now. It's very difficult to feel hopeless when we are truly in the present moment. Hopelessness lies in the future, but hope resides in the now. By drawing these wonky spirals, I'm able to bring myself back to a quiet, calm, non-judgmental space. A space where I can appreciate the imperfection, not just of a wonky spiral, but also in a wonky situation, a wonky moment, a wonky me. The spirals remind me that everything begins and ends. Everything is imperfect. Emotions can be released, my mind can be quieted and my hand can create. They show me that life is as it is. Lines wobble as they wobble and there's beauty and hope in all of it. Final thoughts on hope. I'm glad I've been able to analyze and distill this drawing technique down into a relatively simple process that I can return to again and again. It makes it easier for me to recognize when I'm feeling hopeless. It makes sitting down to draw at that moment more approachable. Because now I know exactly what to draw, wonky spirals. We all lose hope and sink into hopelessness from time to time and that's okay. But perhaps the next time we feel hopeless, we can take a moment to draw wonky spirals about it. Then with the strength of that glimmer of hope, we can begin the journey of drawing to process our emotions. 7. Project Assignment: Project assignment. Now that you've learned about the different ways of making art to process our emotions, it's time to get drawing. For your project assignment, I want you to think about how you're feeling in this moment. Which video and emotion resonated with you most while you are watching this class? Have you lately been feeling annoyed, nervous, or disappointed? Which drawing method called out to you most? Here's a quick refresher of each emotions drawing method, and you can go back to the original video if you need the full walk-through again. For anger, we made angry animal robots. For fear, we made scaredy-cat rugs. For sadness, we made me and my blobbies. For hopelessness, we made wonky spirals. Whichever emotion you choose, please share your work in the project gallery. Here are some guidelines for what to share in your project. The emotion and drawing method you chose, context behind your emotion if you want to share, any progress work you'd like to show, and finally share your completed artwork with us. I love seeing your art and hearing your stories, and I really hope to see your work in the project gallery. We all feel emotions intensely sometimes, and that's okay. But I hope the next time we feel an intense emotion, instead of ignoring or suppressing it, we can take a moment to draw about it. Then we could truly feel our emotion, see it, experience it, process it, and move on to reacting in a healthy and helpful way. These drawing methods have been so beneficial to me, and I hope that this class can help you reconnect and process your own emotions through drawing too. Thanks for watching.