Coping with life's stresses is difficult for everybody, but can be especially challenging for teenagers, who often feel isolated and misunderstood. Creative expression through art, craft, and writing is a natural and effective way of helping young people to explore and communicate personal identity. This book is bursting with art and journal activities, creative challenges, and miniature projects for bedrooms and other personal spaces, all of which help teenagers to understand and express who they are and what is important to them. These fun ideas can be tailored to suit the individual, and require minimal equipment and even less artistic know-how, so can be enjoyed by all. The book concludes with a useful section for counselors and other professionals who work with young people, which explains how these activities can be incorporated into treatment goals. This imaginative and insightful book is a useful resource for all therapists, social workers, and counselors who wish to encourage self-expression in teenagers.

Transformative learning is a theory of adult education that focuses on the profound changes - or transformations - that can occur in the lives of adults. This book explores the role of creative expression in this transformational process. It provides a practical and accessible approach to using creative expression with adult learners

Bringing art into one's life brings a sense of joy and contemplation. Art can bring even more: it can bring a sense of tranquility, empowerment, and emotional release, and it help you orient yourself within the world around you. The CREATIVITY CONNECTIONS book is designed to help you connect through artistic expression in order to promote wellness by bringing more beauty, and more appreciation for beauty, into everyday living. The creativity connections method explains how, regardless of your perceived skill or prior work in art, you can tap into your own creativity, and how you can encourage others, to explore emotions and experience. Engaging in a creative enterprise allows us to connect with our thoughts and our feelings as we contemplate not just the pictures we produce, but also our inner selves. And it enables us to connect with others as we each work on a project in a group or as we collaborate with others on a collective work. Ultimately, there is value in both the process and the product. The creativity connections approach offers a series of ideas and themes to inspire creativity. Art making can be deliberative or subliminal, with industry or without effort, with concentration or without focus. You'll learn how to interpret the work that you create, without judgment or presumption. And throughout, you'll gain insight into how the process and the product afford opportunities for self-growth. Art nurtures and sustains. It provides inspiration and solace. And it is a catalyst for connection with oneself and with others.

The Crosswords Club Collection returns with more of the puzzles enjoyed by the subscribers of the exclusive mail-order service that provides original Sunday-size crosswords. In addition to these special puzzles, there is a unique Answers section, which provides interesting tidbits about each crossword.

This accessible book explores the therapeutic possibilities of poetry and stories, providing techniques for facilitating personally relevant and growth-enhancing sessions. The author provides ideas for writing activities that emerge from this discussion, and explains how participants can create their own poetic and narrative pieces.

Botticelli’s Muse peels back layers of history to tell a fictionalized version of the life of Sandro Botticelli, his conflicts with the Medici family of Florence, and the woman at the heart of his paintings. In 1477, Botticelli is suddenly fired by his prestigious patron and friend Lorenzo de’ Medici. In the villa of his irritating new patron, the artist’s creative well runs dry—until the day he sees Floriana, a Jewish weaver imprisoned in his sister’s convent. But events threaten to keep his unlikely muse out of reach. So begins a tale of one of the art world’s most beloved paintings, La Primavera, as Sandro, a confirmed bachelor, and Floriana, a headstrong artist in her own right, enter into a turbulent relationship.

A guide to the theory and practice of creativity, with proven techniques for jump-starting the creative process—from an esteemed art educator and therapist There are art teachers—and then there’s Shaun McNiff. An accomplished painter himself, he has spent a career helping people access their creative potential through expressive arts therapy. Now, he is sharing the secrets he’s learned from observing his own creative process as well as that of others—both those who identify as artists and those who don’t. The result is nothing less than a master class in creativity by one of the great creative theorists and practitioners of our time. “This is intended as a practical text,” Shaun says, “a creativity primer, striving to capture the essential things that have been of use to me and others.” The wealth of instruction he provides here in these essential things will be indispensable to artists of all stripes, as well as to all who strive to express themselves with honesty and authenticity using any of the media life makes available.

This text shows how the natural creative expression and play of children can be channelled to foster the learning and growth of each individual child. The book explores the nature, development and importance of children's play, suggesting many ways in which it may be fostered and encouraged by adults who work with young children. The aim of the book is to help readers design and implement self-expressive activities focusing on the process of creative expression, showing how to nurture that process, rather than providing a ready-made repertoire of activities and materials.

Artistic expression, spirituality, and meditation combine to capture the Spirit of Drawing Spirit of Drawingengages readers in an intriguing series of illustrated visual experiments that combine meditation, expressive therapy, and hands-on exploration with drawing media. AuthorConnie Smith Siegel's ideas, developed over many years of research and learning, build on the meditation practice of sensory awareness, a blending of Buddhist meditation and simple physical activities. Applied to creative expression, sensory awareness distills drawing and painting to their simplest components: touching, seeing, and moving. In this unusual and freeing book, artists learn to use these new sensations to guide their hand toward the movements, shapes, and colors that express what they are feeling. Not only do the artists produce a work of art, they express their own emotions and inner wisdom. Techniques gradually build to more complex visual expressions such as representational drawing, color theory, composition, and to the use of art in healing. Part art instruction, part art therapy,Spirit of Drawingoffers a rich spiritual pathway to self-expression. • Presents Siegel’s unique ideas, honed over forty years of work in art and in spirituality • An entirely new approach to art education • Innovative ideas for therapists and everyone in the healing professions