Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: I want to talk to you about self-care. Now more than ever, people are stressed out, anxious, and looking for ways to bring more calm and peace into their lives. I'm Caitlin Sheffer and this is Creative Self-care 2.O Now, through series of events in my life, I found myself looking for the perfect way to de-stress. I actually posted a class about this a few years ago called creative self-care, a five-day watercolor challenge to be more relaxed. It was one of my most well-received class and so I knew that I needed to create a 2.O version. I've done extensive research. I've found the best ways to de-stress, unwind, and relax using watercolors. I hope you'll join me as we practice the art of self-care with painting.
2. What to Expect: This class is intended for anyone who feels like they can benefit from a little self-care. We will be examining the principles of mantras, deep breathing, meditation, relaxation, and grounding. The first two exercises are very simple warm up activities intended to give you a foundation for the rest of the class. The remaining exercises involve painting, which I think you'll really enjoy. They are accessible to any level of experience from beginners to advanced. On the fifth and final exercise, we're going to gather our art supplies and head outside. You will complete a questionnaire before the activity and after. This class project will help you determine if the act of art-making really does improve your mood and promote relaxation. We will take photos of our process and upload them to the class project gallery along with our thoughts on how we felt about the experience. You can find a PDF of the questionnaire in the Class Resources section of your dashboard. Simply print it out and answer the questions before you head out the door and again when you finish the painting. I provide comments and feedback on every single project that is posted, as well as offer prizes now and then to those who do post. The community here on Skillshare is amazing. I know you'll find comfort when you see how many other people are struggling with stress in their life. We are not alone. It is important to note that I am not a health care professional. If you're struggling with your mental health, please reach out to a counselor or a physician. I have done it so many times throughout my life and have seen the benefits of it. If you need support, I'm always an email away. Just for fun, I've included two fun bonus videos at the end of this course. The first is a two minute audio track with some soothing music that you can use as a timer when you're practicing your meditation or mantra activities. The second video, well, let's just say I included a blooper reel for you from that one time I got stopped while filming this course. If anything, you'll get a good laugh at my expense.
3. Warm Up One: Mantra Practice with Paint: Exercise one doesn't actually involve any painting on a piece of paper. This is more of a warm up exercise that you can do when you're feeling really stressed out. I love this activity for a lot of reasons. We're going to work on mantras. You may have heard the term mantra before and it might make you think of someone going like this, doing yoga, chanting over and over and over again. Mantra comes from a Sanskrit word, which means a tool for the mind. The really cool thing is that research suggests that it doesn't matter at all. What you say, recite, whatever, it doesn't matter. It just matters that you say it over and over and over again. It helps calm your mind and helps focus your energy into something else and it actually has been proven to lower your stress. Let me show you what we're going to do. I want you to think of a mantra in your head. Decide what yours is going to be. It helps me to think about what is stressing me out the most right now. Right now I'm really sleep deprived. I have a newborn. There's just some things that have been really hard in life lately. Really difficult pregnancy, really difficult make you stay and so the things that are stressing me out have to do with motherhood, family life. I might pick something like repeating the term love to help me focus on those that I love. Or I might want to repeat the phrase, "I'm a good mother." That's the phrase I'm going to say over and over again. It's really powerful what this can do to your mind when you say it over and over again. It helps rewire your brain into believing these things. It helps really with getting over negative brain cycles. What I'm going to do, I'm going to take my lovely jar of water, clear jar. I'm going to take a paint brush. This is a size 10 round brush. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get my brush wet. I'm going to dip it into my paint. You can use any paint color you want. I would recommend choosing your favorite color. I'm going to take my paintbrush and just barely dip it into the water. Just enough so I can drop some of the pigment and watch it [inaudible]. Now let me give you [inaudible] Now's your chance to practice your mantra. Every time your paint brush touches the surface of the water, I want you to say your mantra out loud. "I'm a good mother." "I'm a good mother." "I'm a good mother." I'd like for you to do this for at least two minutes. Now after you have practiced your mantras for about two minutes and you've dropped in all of the paint, I want you to just settle down, bring your eyes to level with the jar and just watch the paints swirl around. Just try to calm your mind and watch as the pigment just drifts to the bottom of the jar. I think you'll find that it's very relaxing after you've practiced your mantras.
4. Warm Up Two: 4-7-8 Breathing: I once heard of a breathing technique called the 4-7-8 breathing method. I wanted to know if there was some specific empirical data backing up this breathing technique. What it teaches you is that you inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, and release for eight. While I was doing research, I did find a study that proved that in patients with COPD, which is a disease of the lungs, that these patients would practice the 4-7-8 breathing method and it did in fact reduce depression, anxiety, and stress. This activity will help us practice our deep breathing and will prepare us for the future painting exercises that we have in this class. You will need a marker or a pen or a pencil. Really any writing utensil is fine. I like to use these markers because they're really steady you can push down really hard. You'll need a blank piece of paper, and on the top of the paper I'd like you to write 4-7-8 just to remind yourself that you're going to inhale for four, hold for seven, exhale for eight. I'm going to just remind myself of the breathing pattern. I'm going to breathe in for four, hold for seven, release for eight, and this is the visual I'm going to give myself. I'm going to breath in for four as I draw an S figure, 1, 2, 3, 4, I'm going to hold my pen for seven,1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Then I'm going to complete this eight figure or an infinity symbol, whatever you prefer to think about S, and I'm going to go up for eight, 1, 2, 3, 4. I'll hit four right at the center,1, 2, 3, 4. That would be four seconds here, four seconds here, and that would complete my eight. Now that I've shown you how to do this activity, I want you to go ahead and set your timer and do it along with me. That was just about eight figures in about two minutes, and as I got closer to the end, my breathing got a lot more, even my figures were a lot more even. The hardest thing for me is inhaling for four seconds. I don't know if it's just my level of stress, but it's hard for me to inhale for four seconds straight. I really had to focus on that and by the end these last three, I felt I was able to complete that a lot easier.
5. Exercise Three: Meditating with Waves: This next exercise is one of my very favorite ways to practice meditation. For me, I love painting leaves. I've talked about it before in several of my other classes, but the motion is just very fluid and gentle and I usually feel very relaxed when I'm done. This activity, we're going to practice painting waves. Studies have shown that viewing an ocean or water scene somewhere out in nature is very relaxing to people. We're going to practice painting some waves to help us meditate. So while we're doing this activity, I want you to try really hard to just focus on the present activity. When you're painting waves, just think about those waves. Think about, I'm painting a wave, it's falling, it's rising. When you focus on that one activity, similar to when we're practicing our mantras, it helps all of the other things fall to the wayside. It helps you focus on what you're doing instead of what is stressing you out. When I'm painting the waves, I'm thinking about those waves, I'm not thinking about my son being sick or the bills that I need to pay. If you find your mind wandering to those topics, just be gentle with yourself. I'm not perfect, you're not perfect and your mind is going to wander. That's what our minds do. If you do struggle with this, don't worry about it. Just try again. The supplies you'll need for this activity are pretty simple. You're just going to need a paintbrush, some watercolor paper, a paint palette, any paint palette will do, and of course, a jar of water since these are watercolors. The goal of this activity is that as you are painting these waves, you will start to feel relaxed, and the motion and the focus that you're giving to the activity will help you just not stressed out about the things in life that normally worry you. It's a very repetitive movement which I find is relaxing. The colors that I'm choosing, they've all been shown to promote stress reduction and relaxation. So go ahead and if you're using a palette like I am, mix up a blue. I'm loading my brush up with this lovely blue paint, and I'm just going to make a wave form. I'm going to go up and back down, up and back down. In terms of watercolor painting, this is a really good activity. Aside from the stress reduction, it's very good at practicing your brush control and how much pressure you put on the brush. So if you see, as I go down, if I put less pressure, I'm going to get a nice thin line, and if I go up and push down more, I'm going to get a broader, thicker line. So it's a really good way to practice pressure on your brush bristles. So let's go ahead for the sake of this example, what if I wanted to have the line this super thin? I'm just going to push very, very gently on the tip of my brush so I get a nice thin line, and if I wanted a broader stroke, I would push down more. So you can have both be thick strokes like this or you could have both be thin strokes. Or if you're like me, you might do a variation of both. So this is what our activity is going to be. We're just going to do waves across the whole page. Don't worry if things aren't looking the way that you want them to. The point of this activity is not in your execution, but in the practice itself. As you move down your page, I think you'll find that you will be in more of a rhythm and you won't have to put as much thought into what you're doing, it will just become a relaxing activity. If you find this wave shape to be difficult for you to master, any repetitive brushstroke would be beneficial. So if you don't like making this wave form, you can practice something else. You could do just lines like this. Or if you are like me and you love painting leaves, you can paint some leaves. So something really simple, which involves just being really light on your brush. Light pressure, and then pushing down and then slowly lifting up. That's another good example of a repetitive action you can do to help practice your meditation. So if the waves aren't working out for you, you can choose another repetitive motion as you meditate. So let's go ahead and do this for about ten minutes.
6. OPTIONAL: Ten Minute Waves Timer: No. Yeah, - you know, - no .
7. Exercise Four: Relaxing with Abstract Watercolors: Last year, my husband and I went through the process of infertility treatments. We were trying to have our second child and it was really difficult. Luckily, it worked out and we got pregnant and we were thrilled. A few months into the pregnancy, I had some complications and landed myself in the hospital. When I was released, I was placed on strict bed rest for months. Once I got home, I was in bed until he was born. I was quickly becoming depressed. I had nothing to do. It was impossible for me to sit in a desk like this and work. Eventually I got to the point where I just could not take it anymore. One day my husband went off to work and I subtle onto the couch and did some painting. When he got home, he could not believe what a better mood that I was in. I was so much more relaxed, I wasn't worrying about the pregnancy, I wasn't feeling stressed out. I was just doing so much better after a few hours of painting on my couch. I immediately thought of this experience while I was doing research for this course. My favorite study from all of my research was one that looked at the cortisol levels of 39 adults before and after the process of making art. The results indicated that art-making resulted in statistically significant lowering of their cortisol levels or less stress hormone. But you want to know my favorite part of this study. The experiment found that there were no significant differences in outcomes based on prior experience with art-making, media choice or gender. Everybody's cortisol lowered regardless of their experience with art and that's what I want you to remember. No matter where you are on the spectrum of experience, whether you're a beginner, intermediate, or advanced, you can benefit from creating, making art and it will reduce your cortisol levels.
8. Exercise Four: Drawing Your Shapes: For this exercise, you will just need some watercolor paper, a brush, some watercolor paints, a jar of water, a paper towel and either a pencil or a waterproof pen. Either one will work, it just depends on your preference. When I was designing this exercise to illustrate the principle of relaxation, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. The most relaxing thing for me when using watercolor paints is watching the pigment spread throughout the water. I want you to either take a pencil or a waterproof pen. This is a mono drawing pen by Tombow. What we are going to do is essentially we're just going to doodle. We are going to create shapes that overlap and then we're going to add paint to those shapes so that they kiss, it's what I like to call it. The water will kiss and the colors will bleed into each other and as you do this and as you watch how the paint spreads throughout the water, I think you'll find that it's very relaxing. Let me illustrate for you what we're going to do. I'm going to start with a circular shape and without picking up my pen, I'm just going to create more shapes and I have no idea where I'm going. Just that I want it to flow around the page. The important thing that I want you to focus on is that you create shapes within shapes because this is where we're going to see all the fun colors bleeding into each other. Let me keep going. I think I'll end it there. All right, so go ahead and get your abstract line-drawing done.
9. Exercise Four: Painting Your Shapes: Now it's up to you which size paintbrush you want to use. I usually use my size 10, this is my favorite brush, but I think because some of these shapes are so small, I'm going to go ahead and use my size 6 brown brush, and we are going to use the wet on wet method, which just means that I am going to take a wet brush with no paint on it, and I am going to fill in this shape with some water. I'm just going to add a little bit of paint to my wet brush and drop it into the water. Now because we're using the wet on wet method, you'll see that the paints spreads all on its own which is really fun to watch. You don't even have to fill in the whole shape if you don't want to. I got a little bit outside the edges, so I'm just smoothing it here. Remember, there's no shame in making a little mistake getting outside of the lines. We are not perfect people. Pay attention to how you're feeling, how you're breathing, what you're thinking about. If you find yourself with your mind wandering to those stressful life issues, take a deep breath. You can think back to your mantras and repeat one of those phrases to yourself to help you concentrate. You can practice the 478 breathing method. Really any of those tools that we've worked on you can use while you're doing any painting activity to help you relax and to help you bring down those cortisol levels. Now let me illustrate with some smaller shapes what I mean by letting the paints kiss. You want to go ahead and fill this shape right here with water. It's got a little bit of that blue because I didn't rinse my brush out enough, but that's okay. We'll just use blue again. It's almost like tie-dye. That doesn't bring you back to childhood. You can keep it one color or you can add in a second color, just doing a touch of green right here. Now while that's still wet, you want to work a little quickly and I'm going to lightly outline right here. I want the water to just barely touch that edge and then I'll quickly fill in the rest of this shape. The goal is you don't want this to dry before you work on the shape next to it. You want the colors to be able to kiss or bleed into each other. So because I used a cool color, I think I will use a warm color over here so that I get to see how they interact when they touch. You're ready. I just want to barely touch the outside so that you can see how the paints bleed into each other. I love watching. Almost looks like little star but it's a little fireworks. You can see how the colors have bled into each other with creating an orange and some purple and because I dropped in the green, it almost looks like a painting of the earth or some galaxy painting. I think that was really cool. This time I think I'll just go ahead and get this whole shape wet and then I will add in this nice little periwinkle blue, and as you can see, it's already starting to creep in to the shape next to it. This time I'm going to do some yellow. You're just going to work your way through all of the shapes. This one was so wet, had so much water that it just fill the entire shape so quickly, so I don't even have to go back and add color into that one. I love how smooth of a transition that is, that's beautiful. Now I'm nearing the end of my painting and I'm already noticing that I feel a little more relaxed than when I started. There is something very soothing about this movement of dragging my brush ever so carefully along the line. I don't know if you find that too, but it is just very gentle motion and calming, in my opinion. This last set, I'm going to get all of it wet all three of these shapes, so I can get one last look at how it all bleeds together. If there's any fine tuning you want to do, go ahead and do that and then you will be all done. I'm just going to smooth out this edge right here, and I am done. I want you to think about this project and how you feel now that it's done.
10. Exercise Five: Getting Outside & Grounding: We've done so many great activities so far to help us practice self-care. But this next activity is by far my favorite. We get to get outside. When I was doing research for this class, I found a study that was amazing. They had two groups of people, people that walked inside on a treadmill and people that walked outside. Both sets of people had EEGs on their brain that studied their brain activity and looked at the center of their brain that measured their meditative state or how relaxed they became. Both groups had increased levels of meditation or relaxation by walking both on the treadmill and outside. But the really interesting thing was the people who walked outside reached a much higher meditative state and the best part is it lasted longer than the people who walked inside on a treadmill. They became more relaxed than their counterparts and the relaxation lasted longer. How cool is that? For this activity, I want you to get outside. It's freezing here. It's wintertime, but I'm still doing it. I put on my warmest coat and a nice cozy scarf and I just, I'm going to go outside and enjoy it. One of the most common ways to deal with anxiety is to practice the art of grounding. It essentially just encourages you to find ways to focus on the present. While we're outside, I want you to focus on your five senses. What you can see, what you can hear, what you can touch. Obviously, we're not going to be doing a lot of tasting, but you get the picture. Focus on the things around you. Now, obviously, because we're doing an art class, I'm going to focus on the visual. See, what you can see, next to me I have these beautiful brushy grass plants. They're so pretty, they happen the most beautiful amber color, they're very delicate. They have little fluffy things on them and I really want to paint these, they're beautiful. Now before you gather up your supplies and head out the door, I want you to make sure to fill out your questionnaire before you get started. Assess how you're feeling, assess your leveling of anxiety, assess how stressed you are, and then when you're done and you do go back inside, I want you to fill it out again and see for yourself how helpful getting outside can be. It's a little tricky when it comes to painting outside, but it doesn't have to be complicated. I have this handy dandy little sketchbook that I like to take with me on outings like this. It's really portable. The pages are small. It's watercolor paper and it's just really, really great. I have a travel set of watercolors, open it up like this and I have a spot for my brush and all the colors that I might need and even some places to mix and then I also carry a little tiny container of water. That's all I need to do my painting.
11. Project Part One: This is the time to print out your questionnaire PDF. Fill it out before you head outside and pay attention to how you're feeling right at this moment.
12. Exercise Five: Paint What You See: This right here is my little sketch book that I like to take with me when I walk around outside. Here, I just found a color and a leaf shape that I really liked, and I turned it into a pattern on one piece of paper, and the same over here. This was a Xenia that was growing in my garden this last spring and just really fun to paint. I'm going to start a new page right here, and I'm going to focus on these really beautiful grassy plants. They have the most lovely amber color. They have some nice texture to them and I think they'll be really fun to paint so let's get started. I have my sketchbook, I have my paint, and I have my little cup of water I'm just going to put to the side down here, and I have some of this really tall, beautiful grass. I'm going to go ahead and look. It has a nice yellowish amber color. I'm just going to mix it up over here. Obviously, just like in all of our other exercises, we're not going for perfection, we're going with how it makes us feel, it's not important that it's an exact replication of the color that you see. Just that it helps you relax while you're painting it. Because the grass is so tall, I'm going to use my sketchbook lengthwise. I'm going to use it vertically instead of horizontal. Each of the grass, all the way to the top gets really wispy, almost like wheat, and now each of these, mines are very fine. They're very wispy. It's a good time to practice your brush control when it comes to putting pressure on your brush, so obviously when I am doing the stem, I'm going to push down harder to make a thicker stem and as I paint these more wispy, I'm just very very lightly touching with the tip of my brush as you can see. It's almost just barely grazing the page. You can go ahead and fill your page with as much as you want. There's a little bit of a reddish tint at the tip of some of these, so when it's wet, I'm going to draw [inaudible] a little bit. Just like we practiced when we did our [inaudible]. This gives it a little more dimension as well, but it's not all just one color. Then I'm just going to add a few more and some of them are kind of curved in. I just want to go for a nice sketched look. There's one really tall one over here. The nice thing is, that you don't have to make some really big ordeal, going to a fancy garden or into the forest, this is literally in my backyard. Oops, see right there, I smudge it with my finger, so do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do what Bob Ross would do, which is to turn my mistake into another piece of grass. No need to get upset. We'll just turn it into another piece of grass. It's looking a little uneven, so I think I'm going to do one last one reaching up here. Now, what's really great about keeping a sketchbook is that you can bring this home and use this as a reference later if you want to create a larger painting. I've done that a lot in the past, especially when I find a cool pattern or a cool leaf shape, I sketch it out in my sketchbook and then I go home and paint it on a larger piece of paper. Here's our first little painting done. Let's move on to the next thing.
13. Exercise Five: Paint What You See (Again): Now over here to my right is a really beautiful pine tree. I'm going to mix up this nice, really pretty green. I'm just going to look at this shape and fill my page with this tree. Now it's a pine tree, and so it has this nice cone shape, and the branches go upwards like this and then meet at a point up at the top. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and start at the bottom and bring it up until this loose tip up here. I've started up at the top, now I'm going to go in and add in some of my main branches. The branches get longer as we reach the bottom. They're shorter up here at the top. I'm used to using a nice sketching, loose hand. Nothing super precise here. This is a sketch book after all. It rounds out down here at the bottom. Okay. That's the general shape of the tree. Now I'm going to go in and add a little more definition. The great thing about using a round brush like this, like we talked about earlier, we don't have to bring lots of different sizes with us because depending on the pressure we put on the brush, we can use the same exact brush and get very different results. Okay. I'm not going to go back in. With this darker color, add in a little more detail. Each of these branches have lots of different pine needles going in an upward motion. I like to start on this side and then move over here because I'm right-handed. If I started on the right side and went to the left then I would smear it. This would be a good time to think to yourself, "Okay, how am I breathing, am I breathing any differently, is my body tense?" If it is, then just take a minute, pause and take a nice deep breath in, let it out and then start again. It's really the beautiful thing about mindfulness, is that even if you find yourself maybe having taken a step back, getting really stressed out and tensed up again, you can just start over and take the chance, take that opportunity to reassess and regroup. I tend to be a perfectionist, which makes it difficult to relax a lot of the time. It's really good for me to remember that nobody's perfect. I'm not always going to be perfect with my breathing, and I am still going to have stressors in my life. But it's really wonderful to have these tools when the time does come. Okay. There's my little pine tree and in our little grassy plants. I think that was really fun, it's a really good exercise in looking around you and being present. Now that you've finished with your paintings, I want you to go back inside and fill out your questionnaire one more time. I know one more thing to do, but I promise I think that you'll find it's very enlightening. I think that you'll find you're more relaxed than when you went outside.
14. Project Part Two: [MUSIC] Now that you've finished your painting, fill out your questionnaire for a second time. Pay attention to how you're feeling now that you've completed your painting. Are you more relaxed? Has your mood improved? After you finish the form, hop on over to the project gallery, and post photos of your process, as well as your thoughts, and feelings about this activity, was it beneficial? I can't wait to hear how it went. While you're there leave a comment on someone else's project. You might get some really good ideas that you can implement in your own practice.
15. That's a Wrap -Way to Go!: Thank you for taking this journey with me toward better self-care. I hope you learned a few new things, and that ultimately, you feel more peace and happiness. You can find me on Instagram, where I share bits and pieces of my life as an artist and behind-the-scenes looks at upcoming projects. Be sure to hit the "Follow" button here on Skillshare so you can be updated when I post new classes.
16. BONUS: "The One Where Caitlin Got Stalked by a Cat": I'm trying to film this segment of my course, and there's a garbage truck going by, there's a random cat stalking me, and there's my neighbor's dog barking to no-one. Activity to do when you're feeling a little anxious. I have a little friend coming to join me. No idea, I don't know whose cat that is. Is it a bad time to say I'm allergic to cats? One of the perks of going outside, I guess. This activity is great if you're out on your own and not so great if you're filming it. I really don't know whose cat this is, and I'm really not a cat person. Really pretty cat though. Oh my gosh it's been knocking over my phone stand. I'm a dog person, I'm sorry, I'm a dog person. Okay, we're going to try this later. Thanks for the bloopers you guys, this cat came into my house. We're really allergic to cats, oh my gosh, get out of my house. I don't know who are please don't bite me. Go away cat. Okay, bye cat. Please don't come back.
17. BONUS: 2 Minute Timer: - but
Caitlin Sheffer, Watercolor Artist & Designer
