More from Art Therapy

This is another example of what our family has done in art therapy.  The real purpose of posting it is to enlighten another family about what may occur in these types of treatments.  

The therapist gave each of us a piece of paper and various drawing implements; pencils, markers, crayons etc.  She asked each of us to make some sort of scribble on each of our pages, an idea that appalled Vale.  I guess his OCD doesn’t allow the unbalanced mess of scribbling.  After each of us did our own scribbling, and Vale did his version of controlled doodling, we had to pick which scribble to use to create a picture.  Then, as a group we would decided what picture we saw in the scribble and bring the picture forward by adding elements.

The scribble chosen was mine, since I had less on my page and they all felt they had more to work with.  The decided that they saw a face in it and each child added an element.  Dolorosa added the eyes, youngest the nose (replete with nose hairs, ugh), Grey drew in the hair… Payne decided that it should be called Nude Ascending a Staircase, so Vale added the staircase.  The kids thought that the sides of the picture looks like cheeks being pushed back by velocity, as if the person was falling out of a plane.  Hence the airplane.  

The picture turned out like nonsense, but the point of the exercise was to have the family work together to create it.  I don’t know how much we learned from it, but it was fun. =)