Psychologists talk about colours influencing the way we feel and act. One of the things we notice in our craft clubs is that people’s moods will influence the colours they choose to work with.
Whether it’s painting or collage, model-making or paper crafts, we try to provide colourful materials for people to work with in our classes. That’s because we believe colour makes things more fun and we always want people to feel more cheerful at the end of a session. But over the years we’ve found that offering lots of bright and colourful things doesn’t always result in bright and colourful artwork.
It’s not all black and white
It’s not that there are particular good-mood/ bad-mood colours. If someone’s feeling low, they don’t automatically reach for dark colours but if a usually upbeat person isn’t feeling that great they’ll often choose sombre shades.
One of our clients is in her 70s, lives on her own and is very disabled, relying on a motorised scooter to get around. She’s pretty much in constant pain, but is incurably optimistic and never lets her situation get her down. She’s drawn to shiny things and sticky gems, sequins, and other colourful embellishments always feature in anything she creates. She has an unerring eye for combining colours to their best effect.
Not that long ago she was dealing with some difficult health issues and although she still used a lot of different colours in her work, we noticed she was choosing darker shades. Chatting to her she admitted she was worried and said it was it a ‘dark colour day’. This casual remark gave us pause for thought.
In another group we have someone who – on an impulse – moved to our area, away from his friends and an active social life. Not surprisingly he found it difficult to settle and was depressed. He enjoys painting, particularly trees, but at our classes the colours he used were always sombre and dark, and the trees were always bare. Thankfully, several months later, he seems to be feeling better about life. His paintings are brighter and now the trees usually have leaves, and sometimes even blossom! We never mentioned his winter colour schemes but it was lovely when he, himself, pointed out that his work was getting more cheerful. And after everyone else had left, he talked frankly about how the move had affected him. His admission that our classes had helped was a positive thing for us to hear.
Final thoughts
A two-hour craft class isn’t long enough to chat with anyone at length so it’s important to be sensitive to people moods, particularly as our sessions are intended to help take people’s minds off their problems.
It’s always a fine balance between keeping conversation light and allowing people to share their thoughts; and it’s also important not to allow one person to dominate a discussion. If things do seem to be getting too serious or difficult, or if the mood of the group is being lowered, we’ve found that prompting people to admire each other’s work or asking one person to give a hand to another can be a useful distraction and help move things on.