The Ronald McDonald House of Dallas, or RMHD, serves as a “home away from home” for families and their children who need to receive hospital treatments for their illnesses. Not only does it provide essential living items for families to adapt to their new homes, but it also supplies families with warm, welcoming environments full of diverse programs, activities, and events tailored to their current interests. Although RMHD already hosts various events, including tutoring sessions for teenagers, playground activities for little kids, and holiday events for families, I noticed the need for a creative platform for children to have self-directed explorations in art and process emotional instabilities through arts experiences. I founded Dreamers’ Palette just for the purpose of exposing children to the joys that lie within the art world and igniting potential in them through creative experiences.
Founded in August 2023, Dreamers’ Palette has been hosting monthly workshops and producing one-stop-shop art kits for children to independently complete their art projects and improve their creativity skills. These children-oriented art kits include the following: a step-by-step instruction pamphlet, base materials for the project, and other craft supplies for further decoration. Since the start of art kit production, projects for art kits have been designed primarily based on the season, holidays, and local news. However, the workshops and art kits can serve a dual purpose: they can bring happiness across children’s daily lives and even help improve children’s mental health. The application of art therapeutic elements to the art kits is the first step in achieving this goal.
Art therapy, a mental health technique combining the fields of visual art and psychotherapy, utilizes art-based practices as treatments for various emotional issues as well as a channel for visual communication. Known for its inherent openness and fluidity without a requirement for a structured approach every time, art therapy plays a huge role in diverse therapeutic purposes, such as equipping people who struggle from mental health challenges with tools to alleviate their stress through therapeutic practices and exposing them to the limitless potential of the art world. A recent Emerson graduate and current University of Texas at Dallas student studying healthcare management, Janhvi Sairam, offers insights into the impact of art therapy based on her art therapy research in the Independent Study and Mentorship program last year, where she worked with local art therapists to delve deeper into the principles and impacts of art therapy.
“Art therapy can be hugely beneficial for children with special needs,” Sairam said. “It can help them process their feelings and potentially reduce feelings of irritation and annoyance by distracting their mind and visualizing things around them.”
Sairam further expands on her thoughts about the profession of art therapy learned from her research.
“One thing I have learned from interviewing art therapists is that the first step is to get to know what the patient likes and dislikes, and why,” Sairam said. “Then they go on to craft a specific intervention keeping that in mind, and as they do more activities, they get better acquainted with the patients’ needs.”
In aiming to enrich art experiences for children to improve their social-emotional well-being, Dreamers’ Palette explores diverse methods to incorporate art therapeutic elements into the art kits. Following are two different art therapy explorations combined with psychological theories for the potential art kit project ideas.
Considered one of the most prevalent psychological theories integrated into art therapy practices, Jungian psychology provides a framework for understanding one’s conscious and unconscious contents and thus allows self-discovery through creative processes. There are countless techniques and theories associated with Jungian psychology, but the most well-known among them are personality theory, active imagination, and dream analysis.
Aiming to help children process their inner world and promote self-reflection through exploratory activities, the first art therapy application integrates the active imagination technique from Jungian psychology and sand play therapy with a sandbox and miniature figures to create scenes and tap into their unconscious thoughts. The active imagination technique, which involves an intentional process of inviting one’s thoughts and feelings to bridge one’s conscious and unconscious state, serves to promote self-discovery and interaction with one’s inner world through artistic dialogue and visualization.
For this art kit, children will first let their imaginations pour through by writing down their past dreams and creative thoughts on a square piece of paper included in the kit. Then, they will start communicating with their subconscious mind by spontaneously externalizing thoughts through sand play therapy with the freedom to create three-dimensional scenes and miniature figures. For instance, if a child has an imaginary dinosaur character in his or her dream associated with certain memories or emotions, he or she can create a scene utilizing different symbols and colors that will help visualize their subconscious, allow them to self-reflect, and even help treat their traumatic experiences.
To the left is a rough outline and design for the first art kit with art therapy applications.
If the first art kit fosters self-discovery of one’s inner world and thus the understanding of emotional challenges and stresses through Jungian psychological theory, the second art kit utilizing Plutchik’s wheel of emotions will allow children to not only decode their emotions but also understand the relationships between their emotions, which is a powerful way to cope with emotional stress by first appreciating and accepting their feelings.
Founded by psychologist Robert Plutchik, the wheel of emotions contains eight primary emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, anticipation, anger and disgust. These primary emotions are often synthesized to create diverse, complicated emotions, such as optimism, love, boredom, and so much more. The wheel is composed of primary, secondary, and even tertiary emotions that people can explore and understand diverse combinations of feelings. The purpose of the wheel is to discover how primary emotions are combined to become layered emotions, allowing them to better understand their emotional challenges. Oftentimes, exploring the basic roots of one’s emotions can pinpoint what to focus on in certain circumstances with the understanding of their complicated feelings and thoughts.
For this art kit, children will first write down eight different emotions they felt throughout the day in each section of the heart-shaped paper. This will allow them to reflect on what emotions filled their day in what conditions and situations. After filling each section with a certain emotion, they will read Plutchik’s wheel of emotions worksheet to dissect their complicated emotions and what primary emotions out of eight were combined to create them, thus understanding the very fundamental roots of emotions and allowing them to objectify their emotions through the wheel. Then, on the same heart-shaped paper on which they wrote their emotions down in each section, they will utilize different art media, such as paint, markers, and even three-dimensional materials, and represent each emotion with colors, shapes, and textures on each section of the paper. Through this practice of understanding the root of emotions, children will be able to understand the origin of their current emotions and even learn to accept them and broaden their emotional capabilities.
To the right is a rough outline and design for the second art kit with a focus on Plutchik’s wheel of emotions.
