Arts 4 Health
‘Mindfulness Painting Experience is a powerful, intuitive, spiritual practice. It is a creative practice of meditating with your brush in your hand. … Mindfulness Painting Experience is an opportunity to discover and interact with your intuition and creativity by being mindful while using paint, paper and brushes. ‘
This is a workshop that I delivered at Mahdlo on my own. I planned this activity based on what was most appropriate for Mahdlo, being more of a pop in session then a full length one.
Aims: Mindful Painting whilst taking part in discussions on “What is arts for health?”, To create a visual representation of mindful painting based on arts for health.
Objectives: Tape down the phrase ‘Arts 4 Health’, let the young people free style paint, mindfully to the music, whilst discussing ‘what is arts for health’ and how they can use it.
This workshop attracted quite a lot of young people,
The factor to draw their interest was “what is arts for health? what does that mean? ” and that is how the conversation and activity starts….
This is more engaging then if it was just free painting on it’s own, as it is based on a focal point that can be engaged with throughout.
At the end I peeled off the tape so the poster read ‘Arts 4 health’, this is now being displayed in the Youth zone.
What did I learn? How can this be developed?
This workshop was a change of plan as I did not expect to be delivering the workshop on my own. For the pop in styled session, it was really appropriate, and Mahdlo were really pleased to have a final outcome that is bright and engaging, to display in their centre.
How can this be improved? It would be a good idea to develop painting images that relate to arts for health? maybe different artistic materials, or things related to mental health?
Perhaps have prompt cards with a focus point to talk about at different stages of the painting? Try finding new ways to direct a conversation…
Exploring Arts For Health 
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