Art for Mental Health & Wellness

Keep Working. Keep Playing. Keep Creating. In his previous books, Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work!, both New York Times bestsellers, Austin Kleon gave readers the keys to unlock their creativity and showed them how to become known. Now he offers his most inspiring work yet, with ten simple rules for how to stay creative, focused, and true to yourself--for life.

The creative life is not a linear journey to a finish line, it's a loop--so find a daily routine, because today is the only day that matters. Disconnect from the world to connect with yourself--sometimes you just have to switch into airplane mode. Keep Going celebrates getting outdoors and taking a walk (as director Ingmar Bergman told his daughter, "The demons hate fresh air"). Pay attention, and especially pay attention to what you pay attention to. Worry less about getting things done, and more about the worth of what you're doing. Instead of focusing on making your mark, work to leave things better than you found them.

Keep Going and its timeless, practical, and ethical principles are for anyone trying to sustain a meaningful and productive life.

Life, Paint And Passion is a deeply involving approach to using the creative process as a tool for self-discovery. With vibrant and contagious enthusiasm, the authors liberate the reader's urge to create freely and spontaneously, as a painter or an artist in another medium, purely for the process of exploration, not for result. With eloquence and simplicity, the authors encourage the reader to journey inward toward his or her authentic self and discover the unique intuition awaiting there. It is this intuition that provides all the tools the reader needs to crumble the barrier between the innermost self and its uncensored manifestation. Through lively interviews with students, the authors explore painting as a practice that facilitates the ecstasy of unfettered expression. With simple brushes, a few dishes of paint, and this book, the reader will be able to coax the hidden self out of the heart and onto a paper. Life, Paint And Passion is the result of nearly thirty years of intensive work with the painting process. It provides powerful insights into the act of creation, a solid base for facing and transcending creative blocks, and brings fresh perceptions and healing to life.

Fans of DIY projects and crafts will conquer their fear of failure and create their own masterpieces using this fun and inspiring handbook. Get Crafty. Make Great Stuff. Be Creative!

The number one fear of all creative types--crafters, DIYers, makers, artists--is that failure lurks right around the corner. Crafty blogger and creativity guru Kim Piper Werker urges everyone to pick up their pen or paintbrush or scissors and make something mighty ugly: get that "failure" out of the way. This friendly book offers up a multi-pronged approach to overcoming creative fears through inspiring essays and anecdotes, interviews, exercises and prompts, and sage advice from all over the creative spectrum to help individuals slay their creative demons.

A passionate and inspiring guide to creating a life built around the creative process. This groundbreaking new work from the bestselling author of The Artist's Way, guides readers in creating a vision for their lives in which art and life are inextricably linked. According to Julia Cameron, when we allow our creative spirit to serve as our compass, we discover that the art we have always longed to create is suddenly within our grasp. In The Creative Life, Cameron shows readers how to use their creative hearts and minds to cultivate lives that nourish and sustain their art. Through beautifully drawn scenes from her own life, as well as the lives of the many artists around her, Cameron reveals that creativity flourishes during the quiet pauses in our lives-and that it is only when we allow ourselves to slow down and savor life that we discover ways to depict it sensitively and poetically in our art. By opening the curtain on her own life and the lives of the artists who surround her, Cameron reveals a world rich with creative possibility.

Here's a life lesson for all: It's OK to make a mistake. In fact, better than ok! Beautiful Oops! shows young readers how every spill and smear, stain and tear, is an opportunity to make something beautiful. Filled with pop-ups, lift-the-flaps, tears, bends and smudges, it's a joyous book that celebrates the journey from blunder to wonder.

With a simple, witty story and free-spirited illustrations, Peter H. Reynolds entices even the stubbornly uncreative among us to make a mark -- and follow where it takes us. Her teacher smiled. "Just make a mark and see where it takes you." Art class is over, but Vashti is sitting glued to her chair in front of a blank piece of paper. The words of her teacher are a gentle invitation to express herself. But Vashti can't draw - she's no artist. To prove her point, Vashti jabs at a blank sheet of paper to make an unremarkable and angry mark. "There!" she says. That one little dot marks the beginning of Vashti's journey of surprise and self-discovery. That special moment is the core of Peter H. Reynolds's delicate fable about the creative spirit in all of us.

In Heart Steps, Cameron shares beautiful prayers of empowerment followed by potent declarations on the nature of creativity that extend beyond affirmations to facilitate a powerful awakening of the artistic child within and revitalize fading dreams, while lending encouragement and compelling reminders that we can all tap into the creative spirit. Heart Steps is certain to ignite the creative spark, drawing readers inward toward the fire of their own creativity. Whether read in one sitting or savored over time, Heart Steps is a book no creative being will want to be without.

Through personal interviews and galleries of bird-related fabric artwork, this book celebrates birds and the artists that have been inspired and moved by them. Escape into an unexpected world of avian fiber art. This collection--brought together by Martha Sielman, executive director of Studio Art Quilt Associates, Inc. (SAQA)--tells how artists live creatively and how birds fit into their lives and inspire them. Bird lovers, needlecrafters, quilters, and other crafters of all ages will be delighted by this book with gorgeous images of avian art on and with fabric and other materials. Interviews with and quotes from more than 100 of these artists give "live creatively" advice and inside information about the gorgeous bird-inspired art that they create. More than 200 master crafters--quilters, embroiderers, and other fabric artists--from 15 countries on six continents from different backgrounds and experiences share their love of birds and the inspiration they find in them. Includes photographic galleries of avian art and crafts sorted by bird types, including birds like finches, gulls, owls, woodland birds, birds of prey, and many more. More than 500 full-color images. Readers can curl up in their favorite chairs and enjoy the best of "bird stitchery" or they can share it with the bird lovers in their life!

In the tradition of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, this book leads you by both heart and head to acknowledge, reinforce and use your own creative abilities and to fully acknowledge life itself as a creative act. Stories and practices are enhanced by an inviting design.

In 1992, Julia Cameron published a groundbreaking work that offered an original and astoundingly effective twelve-week course in creative discovery. With nearly two million copies sold, The Artist's Way is now a classic cherished by the aspiring and working artists who have experienced its rich benefits. Walking in This World picks up where The Artist's Way left off to present readers with a second twelve-week course - Part Two in an amazing journey toward discovering our human potential.

In Walking in This World, Cameron shows readers how to inhabit the world with a sense of wonder, a childlike inquisitiveness that each of us was born with. "Great artists are actually great amateurs," she writes in her introduction. "They have learned to wriggle out of the seriousness of rigid categorization and allow themselves to pursue the Pied Piper of delight."

Full of valuable new strategies and techniques for breaking through difficult creative ground, this is the "intermediate level" of the Artist's Way program. A profoundly inspired work by the leading authority on the subject of creativity, Walking in This World is destined to become a classic in its own right.

In this landmark book on the creative process, the bestselling author of The Artist's Way reveals the intricate soul work artists must undertake in order to find inspiration. In The Sound of Paper, Julia Cameron delves deep into the heart of the personal struggles that all artists face. What can we do when we face our keyboard or canvas with nothing but a cold emptiness? How can we begin to carve out our creation when our vision and drive are clouded by life's uncertainties? In other words, how can we begin the difficult work of being an artist?

Drawing upon her many years of personal experience as both an artist and a teacher, Julia Cameron guides readers to a place where they can find the strength and courage to create. Demonstrating how this involves a process of constant renewal, of starting from the beginning, she writes, "When we are building a life from scratch, we must dig a little. We must be like that hen scratching the soil: 'What goodness is hidden here, just below the surface?' we must ask."

With exercises designed to develop the power to infuse one's art with a deeply informed knowledge of the soul, this book is an essential artist's companion from one of the foremost authorities on the creative process. Julia Cameron's most illuminating book to date, The Sound of Paper provides readers with a spiritual path for creating the best work of their lives.

Creativity is not a gift from the gods, says Twyla Tharp, bestowed by some divine and mystical spark. It is the product of preparation and effort, and it's within reach of everyone who wants to achieve it. All it takes is the willingness to make creativity a habit, an integral part of your life: In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

In The Creative Habit, Tharp takes the lessons she has learned in her remarkable thirty-five-year career and shares them with you, whatever creative impulses you follow -- whether you are a painter, composer, writer, director, choreographer, or, for that matter, a businessperson working on a deal, a chef developing a new dish, a mother wanting her child to see the world a new.

When Tharp is at a creative dead end, she relies on a lifetime of exercises to help her get out of the rut, and The Creative Habit contains more than thirty of them to ease the fears of anyone facing a blank beginning and to open the mind to new possibilities. Tharp's exercises are practical and immediately doable -- for the novice or expert. In "Where's Your Pencil?" she reminds us to observe the world -- and get it down on paper. In "Coins and Chaos," she provides the simplest of mental games to restore order and peace. In "Do a Verb," she turns your mind and body into coworkers. In "Build a Bridge to the Next Day," she shows how to clean your cluttered mind overnight. To Tharp, sustained creativity begins with rituals, self-knowledge, harnessing your memories, and organizing your materials (so no insight is ever lost). Along the way she leads you by the hand through the painful first steps of scratching for ideas, finding the spine of your work, and getting out of ruts into productive grooves. In her creative realm, optimism rules. An empty room, a bare desk, a blank canvas can be energizing, not demoralizing. And in this inventive, encouraging book, Twyla Tharp shows us how to take a deep breath and begin!

"Csikszentmihalyi arrives at an insight that many of us can intuitively grasp, despite our insistent (and culturally supported) denial of this truth. That is, it is not what happens to us that determines our happiness, but the manner in which we make sense of that reality. . . . The manner in which Csikszentmihalyi integrates research on consciousness, personal psychology and spirituality is illuminating." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

The bestselling classic that holds the key to unlocking meaning, creativity, peak performance, and true happiness. Legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi ("the leading researcher into 'flow states'" -- Newsweek) demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives.

In this wired, wild world, it is harder than ever to shut out noise and busyness in order to truly calm yourself, but in Crafting Calm, a D. I. Y. guide to peace of mind, you'll find inspiring ideas for how to do exactly that through a wide range of creative exercises. In this book, author Maggie Oman Shannon explores crafts and creativity as a practice with enormous physical, mental, and spiritual benefits. By immersing ourselves in a craft with intention and mindfulness, we can quiet those voices around us and in us - we can enter sacred stillness. Through revealing interviews, personal stories, and forty suggested activities, the author shows how creative processes can become spiritual practices. Whether you're an aspiring artist, longtime craftsperson, or someone who has never set foot in a craft-store (yet!), you'll find something in Crafting Calm to inspire you. Crafts and how-to ideas include contemplation candles, visual journals, prayer shawls, collage mandalas, intention beads

How do you make room for making art? Do you long to uncover secrets to sneaking more creative time into your day, or to making your studio the perfect place to unleash your artistic potential? Have you often wondered how successful creative types seem to manage both with ease?

In her inspiring follow-up to Living the Creative Life, author Rice Freeman-Zachery has gathered together a talented new group of artists to share their time-finding tricks and studio-savvy tips, to help you find your own Creative Time and Space. Whether you're looking to clear more space in your head for creative thinking, or to make the most of the time you do manage to sneak into your studio, the help you need is all right here.

Discover ways to keep the creative part of your brain engaged even during activities such as shopping or doing "business work" on the computer. Learn how to budget your time by spending less of it surfing the internet and more time sketching out your next creative project. Pull yourself out of a creative rut with ideas from reorganizing your studio to remembering that mistakes can be fun to forcing yourself to try a new color palette. Obtain an insider look into the studios of several successful artists and get a glimpse of where they get to go to work every day and the rituals they use to get the juices flowing. Try out jump-starting exercises for your brain and unleash an entirely new creative direction.

Creative Time and Space is just the friendly push you need to work more of what you love (making art) into your life and to love whatever space you create it in.

A stunning picture book ode to the joys of the creative process and the spirit of collaboration. This lyrical story from Danielle Davis and Mags DeRoma is perfect for fans of Kevin Henkes, Gyo Fujikawa, and Julie Fogliano; To make . . . a cake, a garden, a song, you first gather, then make -- and wait. To make a story (like this one), you gather, make, wait. To make anything -- big or small -- it will take some time. You may have to gather more, make more, and wait a little more, but you can create wonderful things if you just gather, make, and wait.

This gorgeous, timeless book gently emphasizes patience as part of the making process and is a fitting book for all homes, classrooms, and makerspaces everywhere.