This post is part of the Soul Foraging spring series, a nature-based creative practice for women ready to reconnect with their stories. Each post includes a soul foraging prompt, a mixed media collage invitation, and a reflective creative wellness check-in rooted in art therapy.
This post is an invitation to map your inner landscape, the parts that feel clear and the parts that feel tangled. Spring has a way of stirring both at once. The light returns, things start moving again, and sometimes that's a lot to hold. Through a mixed media collage practice rooted in art therapy, we'll give both the chaos and the calm a place to exist on the page. Not to resolve them. Just to let them be seen.
What you'll need: A piece of paper or an open journal page, whatever size feels right. Acrylic or watercolour paint. Torn paper scraps: old book pages, patterned paper, tissue paper, anything you have nearby. Washi tape if you have it. A pencil or pen. Art medium or glue. Optional: found natural materials from your walk, pressed flowers, bark, a leaf rubbed in paint.
Step one: Begin with your inner landscape.
Close your eyes for a moment and let an image come. It doesn't need to make sense. Ask yourself: What does the inside of me feel like right now? Is it tangled? Wide open? Full of paths going in different directions? Is there something dense and uncertain alongside something that feels clear?
Let whatever comes be enough to start with. It might be abstract. It might feel a little strange. That's exactly right.
Step two: Lay down the landscape.
Begin covering your page loosely with paint or torn paper scraps. This is the background, the outer world of your map. Think of the spring colours around you: soft greens, pale greys, the warm ochre of new bark, the blue of a May sky. Let it be loose and imperfect.
If you have washi tape, try layering strips to suggest birch trees, or paths, or the kind of structured chaos that feels like a forest in spring. Strips of painted paper work just as well.
You're building a landscape. It doesn't need to be realistic. It just needs to feel like something.
Step three: Place the chaos.
In your inner world right now, what are the tangled parts? The paths that crisscross without arriving anywhere? The feelings that circle?
You might represent this with overlapping lines in ink or pencil, with torn paper going in different directions, with layers that don't quite resolve. Let the chaos have a place on the page. Don't tidy it up yet.
Step four: Find the sanctuary.
Now look at what you've made and ask: Where could something soft live in here?
Tear a small shape, a heart, a rough circle, a nest-like form, out of thicker paper, handmade paper if you have it. Something that feels held and whole. Place it somewhere in your landscape, not at the centre necessarily, but somewhere it makes sense. Tuck in a scrap of green paper for moss. Add a small flower pressed from a walk, or draw one. A few warm colours, cream, soft gold, pale rose, to suggest candlelight or warmth.
This is your sanctuary. The place within the chaos where something in you knows how to rest.
Step five: Settle it with words.
If it feels right, add a word or a short phrase somewhere on the page. It might be inside the sanctuary, or written lightly in the chaotic part. Something you needed to say, or something you needed to hear.
It can be hidden under a layer of tissue. You're the only one who needs to know it's there.
A Note from My Studio
I started with bits and pieces already on my art table from another project. The title of a music page caught my eye right away - “Lead me to some soul today”. It felt perfect, so I placed it at the top and worked my way down from there.
I had a small piece of handmade paper with raised vertical lines on it. I tore it into strips and laid them across the page like trees, then used a Stabilo pencil in black to define them a little.
From there, I layered used teabag paper across parts of the page. The strings left from the teabags seemed to be asking to be used, so I let them become a nest. Into the nest I added a tiny feather from a walk, a small bit of colourful wool, and a few pieces of dried flowers and leaves.
The tiny bit of turquoise wool sitting inside the nest made me think of a robin's egg -- something small, colourful, and a little fragile. And maybe that was me. A small, precious egg held safely by feathers, grasses, sticks, and leaves. All the things a nest is made from. All of them holding me. The way nature does.
The word sanctuary came to me when I sat quietly with the page. I wrote it on a piece of used teabag paper -- that way, if it didn't work out, it wouldn't touch the journal page underneath. I used medium to adhere it once I was happy with it.
For finishing touches, I added a little gesso with almost a dry brush to soften some of the areas around the nest. A couple of poster paint pens added a few hearts and small doodles.
Materials used: vintage book pages, handmade paper, used teabag paper, teabag string, a tiny piece of white birch, matte medium to adhere everything, a Stabilo All pencil for definition, a black tumble pen for writing, ribbon, a small piece of wool, a tiny piece of lace, and a few bits from my walk: a tiny feather, a few small leaves, a tiny flower.
I made this page without labouring over it. I wanted it to stay free and fluid -- to hold the feelings from my walk, my time outside, and the questions I'd been sitting with, and put them all onto the page.
This isn't a polished piece of art, and that was never the point. It was about noticing. About following what this spring season was stirring up, inside and out.
Creative Check-In
When your piece feels complete, or simply finished for now, sit with it for a moment.
Look at where the chaos is, and where the sanctuary is. Notice whether they're close together or far apart on the page.
Then ask yourself, without pressure: What does it feel like to know that both of these things can exist in the same landscape?
You don't need to answer that out loud. Let the collage hold it.
If You Feel Drawn to Go Deeper
If this practice is opening something in you, a thread you want to keep following, a quiet curiosity about your own story, there's somewhere you can take it.
Soulful Stories, my mixed media collage workshop, grew out of exactly this kind of making. The kind where you don't start with a plan. Where you begin with paint and paper and something you can't quite name, and then slowly, layer by layer, a figure emerges. A form. A story you didn't know you needed to tell.
Inside the workshop, we work with collage, paint, found materials, and reflective creative wellness practices to help you uncover and honour your own visual story. No art experience is needed. Just an open heart and a willingness to begin.
If you feel drawn to explore this further, I've opened up the beginning of Soulful Stories for you -- a space to start creating and discovering your own visual story, using materials you likely already have. Just follow the link below to step inside.
No pressure, no payment. Just a heartfelt invitation to explore what's possible, one layer at a time.
Claim your free Creative Taster here
And if it feels like home, the full Soulful Stories workshop is waiting for you, whenever you're ready, for just $97.
Continue the Journey
If you're just arriving here, this series began a few weeks ago with three earlier posts, each one its own invitation:
Soul Foraging: The First Step Into Spring — the beginning: stepping outside and letting the season wake up your senses
Soul Foraging: A Nature-Inspired Mixed Media Collage Practice — a forest bathing walk and the first creative collage invitation
Soul Foraging: Layering Memory into Mixed Media Collage — letting a memory surface on a spring walk and bringing it into layered intuitive art
There's no right order. Follow what feels right.
Until then, happy foraging,
I live and create on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabeg peoples, lands that remain under their original stewardship. I honor their enduring connection to this place and their care for it over generations.
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