Paint your feelings
10-minute art activity
Use paint to express an emotion you've recently felt.
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Paint your feelings
What you need
Coloured watercolours, ready mixed paint or coloured inks | Sheets of white cartridge paper | Soft brushes
Steps
To paint your feelings:
• lay out your materials in front of you
• take a few moments to settle yourself before choosing an emotion you’ve recently felt
• while holding that emotion in mind, select just a couple of colours and a couple of shapes
• using your paints or inks allow the emotion to guide your hand in making coloured shapes on the page
• repeat this exercise a few times using different emotions and a different selection of colours and shapes
• share your images
How do your abstract images compare to other people’s? How have different emotions been represented? Can other people guess which feeling you were trying to express?
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More
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Emotions teaching resource
From Royal Academicians to Young Artists, see how artists and works of art express emotions and elicit emotional reactions.
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The joy of painting flowers
Diana Armfield RA writes about the relationship she has with the flowers in her garden.
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Sensing spaces
In 2014, an architecture exhibition took over the Royal Academy that invited audiences not just to step inside it, but to touch it, smell it and feel it. Watch our 15-minute Sensing Spaces documentary.
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