Crafting with Heart 

Make some art with the family for Valentine’s Day and help continue the year with self-care.

With Valentine’s Day near and as we fully embark into this new year, this is a great time to practice self-care with some art.

Creating art doesn’t only help with self-care but also self-love. Creating art validates the uniqueness of an individual, which increases a sense of accomplishment and feeling of positive self-worth.

Here are some crafty, creative and fun festive art activity ideas to do with loved ones — or even on your own — in time for Valentine’s Day.

Create a Valentine/New Year vision board.

This is similar to making a crafty collage. Vision boards are typically made with pictures and crafty items like stickers, cut-outs, ribbons, flowers, hearts, decorations, fabric, paint, glitter, drawings, pom-poms, magazine images, etc. They are glued onto a board, and they help you visualize your outlook and goals for the future. Setting goals is helpful: If you believe that positive things are going to happen, they usually do. A vision board is a type of blueprint, not only of the vision you have for your life, but it also reflects the feelings you want to see come forward in your life.

Create a self-love, sweet treat jar for yourself.

This can make cute, unique Valentine’s gifts and keepsakes, too. After creating the jar, it can be filled with candy hearts or any of your favorite holiday treats, trinkets, love notes, etc. Use a glass or plastic jar with a lid, or a Mason jar, that you can decorate. You will be drawing and painting the outside of the jar with either paint pens, acrylic or enamel paints. I like to use stickers, gems, pom-poms (use glue or double-sided tape to stick on), paint, ribbons and paper markers to write the notes. Write positive affirmations or attributes you love about yourself or others with markers. These statements can be anything you like about yourself or loved ones. On Valentine’s Day, or anytime you feel like it, you can read your positive affirmations to give yourself a boost of self-love and positivity. Filling your jar with conversation hearts that you read is fun and sweet, too. One of the benefits of this activity is that you can constantly add positive affirmations and self-loving statements to the jar over time, anytime. This is a great gift idea, as well, because you can create one for family members, including your thoughts and feelings about why you love them, and can continue adding notes to the jar beyond Valentine’s Day. 

Create a colorful self-portrait.

You can either trace your body outline with the help of a loved one for a life-sized work of art, or draw an outline of your full body self-portrait on a regular piece of drawing paper. Next, you will write with a marker all the things you love about yourself starting with the words “I am.” Start with at least five. After writing all over the inside of the outline, you then will use either oil pastels, crayons or colored pencils to make it look like your very own self-portrait from head to toe.

Make Valentine’s/New Year’s dreamcatchers.

Dream big, be inspired and may all your dreams come true. Creating a dreamcatcher is a therapeutic art activity that is a great mindful, stress-reducing, calming, centering arts-and-crafts activity. This is a great art project for this new, fresh season of love and new year. The idea is to create a personalized dreamcatcher to capture dreams, goals and positive affirmations. Having a dreamcatcher in your room offers a sense of tranquility and calmness. Dreamcatchers are traditionally meant to be gifted, which makes this a great gift for a loved one, or even better yet, make one together while talking about dreams and goals in the new year. There are endless ways to make different dreamcatchers. 

Diana Shabtai, Psy.D., ATR-BC (“Miss Dee”) created Art Therapy OC in 2012 as a place to explore the world of art, its creative possibilities and therapeutic benefits for healthier living.