An art therapy sketchbook, DRAW A LINE, has been created to help you experience the revelations of art through your own creative expression.

DRAW A LINE will instill you with a new sensibility about how you experience art. Using this sketchbook will teach new ways of seeing and thinking that will help you grow as a person, increase your self-awareness, and give form to the story of your life.

Drawing activities are written to give hope, echo and dignify suffering, rebalance and guide, and teach important therapeutic ways to make art.

Art that matters to us, moves the heart. The spirit of an artist’s gift can wake our own. 

This site is a place to exchange gifts. By sharing your drawings and stories, you give back to the growing community of cancer patients. Feel the affection of those you don’t know as art unites us and enables us to pass good things of life to others.

DRAW A LINE is created for cancer patients and support groups because art provides comfort and relief. Art reduces tension and offers hope. The drawings and the discussion of visual art enable patients to start talking, sharing, and navigating the path to healing. Lessons in the sketchbook are more than about art, they also help find a new narrative and give the courage needed to face cancer prognosis.


I am so grateful my mother’s lung cancer was caught in its earliest stage where it could be removed instead of overmedicated. Alas, at the same time my mom was recovering from having the cancer removed; one of her best friends, Mickie, was being consumed by the same disease. Daily they talked on the phone giving each other strength and courage to do even the most simple daily activities. In the last few weeks of Mickey’s life, as they could they talked for hours. Shared pain and laughter and tears of love. When Mickey Coolie passed away, so did a bit of my mom. But in the void Mickey left, grew a stronger mother than I ever known. Cancer is an equal opportunity life changer.

As my mother graduated from Pulmonary Therapy, regaining confidence and breathing ability. I gifted her a soon to be published Sketchbook by a woman who had also survived cancer, Nicolette Harrington.

Chris Terrell, owner of How it Works, saw much more than drawings that Nicolette wanted printed for staff at Swedish Medical Hospital. He saw Nicolette’s sketches as art that had the opportunity to help not only doctors understand but other people going through a similar journey. Terrell encouraged and guided Nicolette in telling her own story through words as they intertwined with her drawings. What was created through blending drawings of pain and fear, with words of patience and guidance became a sketchbook, “Draw a Line.”

As my mother read through the text in “Draw a Line” and all the open opportunities of expression, my mother took the deepest breath, and let go a sob that she had been holding in for months. Each page feels like a friend, allowing long held honesty to flow unjudged.

****

How It Works helped create and print an everlasting gift. One with new beginnings to endings unknown, like a labyrinth of personal life and continued discovery.

***

If this simple sketch book my mother received is any inclination of it’s power to influence the way one looks at the world during and after cancer, it too is an equal opportunity life changer. Through working with drawing techniques in the book; everyday she is practicing art as self love. She pulled out of storage all the art supplies she was too shy to try. As she was reading Nicolette’s words, allowing herself to again feel genuine fear and grief of cancer; she began to release stress in a form of beauty she could see.
— Antonella Novi
 

 

Gallery

Drawings from DRAW A LINE

 
 

Your drawings offer guidance to others. Out of sharing, there can be connection, new insights, and healing. Honor your courage as you consider what is best in your drawing as you publish on this web site. 

Include permission to post your work. Gallery images will be updated.

Send photos along with written consent to nicolette@wingshadowstudios.com

all content on this site, draw-a-line.squarespace.com, is copyright 2018, all rights reserved, by Nicolette Harrington