Mindfulness and Art

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Imani from life drafting. Welcome to my Skillshare class. Living in an on-demand and fast-paced world. Sometimes you forget to take care of ourselves. It's not until we were exhausted and a breaking point that we realized how important taking care of your mental health is. In this class, I'm going to teach you some breathing techniques as well as some art exercises will help you in your daily life. These are easy to incorporate into your life and he's a practice almost anywhere. Choosing to include mindfulness and art in your daily life. It can help reduce your stress levels as well as the anxiety. It also helped to develop more compassionate for yourself, especially when the times get hard. Class is meant for anyone who wants to include mindfulness and art in their daily practice materials that anything that you choose. But I will give some guidance according to what I found helpful and most useful. We'll have a final class project. You'll incorporate the techniques you learned and make a final journal page for yourself. Hope to see you in class. 2. Class Project: I'm so glad you decided to take the class. For this class, we'll be working on making your own art journal page. Please feel free to get inspiration where you can find it. This can be from books, from magazines, from online, anywhere that you feel like you draw the most inspiration from. After you create your page, please feel free to post it in the class. In the next lesson, we'll talk about the materials. 3. Materials: Like I mentioned before, the materials for this class are completely optional. Please don't feel like you need to go out and buy. Everything I'm showing you is just giving you more options. So you can choose the best for your practice. The first thing you need to decide on what type of paper you want to write on. Are you planning to sketch a lot with your pencil or are you planning to use a lot of heavy materials like acrylic? There are many shapes and sizes of paper you can decide on. You could decide to use a sketchbook or even use loose paper. It's completely up to you. If you're not sure where you wanna go with your art, I would recommend mixed media paper. This gives you a lot more options whether you decide to do water-based painting like watercolor or acrylic gouache. Or if you choose to do any sketching. This type of paper is able to handle both. Depending on the media that you choose. You might need some brushes. I will try to see how big the paper that you're using it and by the brushes according to their sides. What I recommend is one medium-sized brush and one fine brush. For details. You can always add more later on. Sometimes fine liners and gel pens come in handy, especially for detail work or adding some quick notes. You also need an eraser. I'm just using one of the kneadable eraser. You'll also need a pencil. Depending on whether you like a mechanical pencil or a regular pencil is completely up to you. If you are using a regular pencil, you might need a sharpener. Based on the media you're using. You might need water. I use one cup for clean water and then one for dirty water. A pallet to dispense your paint and might be helpful. Some additional things I add our rulers, as well as washi tape to create clean borders. The choice of media is completely up to you. I prefer gloss and watercolor. You can include watercolor pencils, regular color pencils. Pastels, especially these candle wax pastels, they're water-soluble. So they're great to take it on the go. And that's all you really need. Then next class, we'll talk about how to put all of this stuff together. 4. Mindful Art Exercise: We're finally ready to start our class. We're going to begin by doing a breathing technique. Start by sitting comfortably. Take a deep breath through your nose for four seconds. Hold that breath for seven seconds. Breathe out from your mouth for eight seconds. Repeat this six to eight times. We're going to start gathering your materials. But I want you to remember the reading technique that you learned. Whenever you start feeling overwhelmed. Go back to the breathing technique. After picking out the colors that I use mixed media paper to start setting up my journal. Right now I'm just adding water to all the paint. After cleaning the brush, I guess some clean water from my brush. With just water, I start outlining designs that I want on my paper. While you're doing this, try to scan your body and see where you're holding tension. Is it a new shoulders? Is it in your neck? Wherever you feel it, just take a deep breath. Go back to the breathing technique and continue. Once you're done with the design in water, pick up some paint and drop it in where the water lines are. This is similar to the wet on wet technique. If you're not sure what that is, please check out my other classes. Pay attention to how the colors are flowing into each other. Take note of the color mixes that you like. You can use another pen or brush to start making splatters. All you have to do is tap it. The most important thing is to just have fun. Take a deep breath, focus on your mind, and continue making beautiful patterns. I won't put music in these videos. Typically when I do this at home, I like to have complete silence and I just focus on my breath. For this practice, I chose the word that resonated with me because one of my favorite ways to close out the session. In the next exercise, we're going to use the same technique, but in a more organized way. This is useful for those hectic days where you just need some order. I'm just using a round object, make my circles. Once I'm done, I use some clean water and fill in the circles. One thing to remember is to not flood your paper. You just want to clean sheen of water when you're looking at it. And you're done. You could choose to let it dry and add some details on top, or you could just leave it as is. In a final exercise. We're going to do some gradients using a one stroke technique. Start off by pre mixing the colors that you want. Once you load your brush is very little pressure. You don't want to be too aggressive. Start off by laying the tip of your brush gently against the paper. Make a very light stroke before it started to increase the pressure very gently. As you pass the halfway mark, start decreasing the pressure again and bring you brush to a point. Whenever you go back to load your paintbrush to the slightly different color than the one that you premixed. But I try to do is make every leaf of breadth. So by the time that I'm done with this painting, I'm pretty much super focused on how my breathing is. Once the first layer is completely dry and go back and start adding some details. And you're done. The next class, you will see the whole process. 5. Process: I wanted to end this class with a view of my process. Basically I'm starting off with deciding which colors I want to be using and just making swatches. This is one of my favorite things to do. It's not only relaxing, it kinda helps me get over the blank white page syndrome. After I'm done swatching, I'm ready to start my painting. So first thing I do is tape off my paper. Start off by making a light sketch of what I want to be drawing. This is that we're gonna be covering it with colors. Don't worry too much about having clean lines. I just want to have a basic understanding of where my paint is gonna go. I'm gonna draw some mountains and they're going to represent some of the stresses and hurdles I've kinda been facing. If you choose to do this exercise as well, you could pick six to seven mountain peaks. And depending on how big your hurdles are, you can represent it by making the mountains bigger. And basically the smaller hurdles can be smaller mountains or they can just be mountains. After I'm done with the outline, I use clean water to fill in my mountains before adding color. At this stage, I basically go with any color that makes me feel good. Now that my first layer is dry, I'm going to start adding details. During the detailed process, sometimes I go back to the breathing technique. This way, I can feel my body relaxing. Lets you add the final touches. You're done. 6. Conclusion: Congratulations on finishing the class. Before we end, I want to go through one more round of deep breathing. Most important thing to take away from this class is the breathing technique. Everything else is just the cherry on top. I hope to see your class projects and see you next time.