Everyone has an inner artist. What falls into the category of art is so wide and varied it encompasses nearly every creative activity. As humans, we are creative beings. Some of us create art as a hobby and some of us as a job. But did you know you can also use art to enhance your magickal practice?
What is Art Magick?
Taking whatever your preferred form of art is and adding witchcraft correspondences to it is known as art magick. This could be anything from using colors, knot magick, personal sigils, numerology, and more. Whatever you choose, as always in any witchcraft practice, intention is the most important part of creating effective change. In this case, your art will be your medium. You can incorporate art magick as part of a spell or as the entire spell itself.
If art and divination have existed since the beginning of humanity, we can guess that using art as divination has been around just as long. If we consider art we already use in divination, such as the tarot, or channeling methods such as automatic writing, it is easy to see how one could channel messages from The Divine into artwork as well. Tarot uses imagery to bypass the subconscious by using symbols we already associate with certain concepts. In other words, tarot is a form of art magick you may already be using without realizing it.
But how can you incorporate art magick into your own witchcraft practice? One way seen quite often is to use it as a part of your Book of Shadows. A Book of Shadows is a personal notebook where a witch can keep their spells and correspondences or anything else they may want to remember for reference. You may choose to draw or paint in your book of shadows, perhaps using certain colors in your notes or protective symbols on the title page.
Create Your Own Art Magick
Painting and drawing are some of the most common ways to practice art magick because you have the most options to make it your own. You can add art magick to a regular painting or drawing or make your painting into a spell by writing out your intention and adding visual correspondences such as crystals, plant allies, or animal spirits according to what they represent.
Use colors that have meanings matching what you want to manifest and numerology to choose how many lines to add to your painting for example, or the number of blooms on your plant. You can consider how sharp angles represent protection, or long lines can represent prosperity or success. If you work with astrology in your practice, you can even use the glyphs that represent specific signs and planets to call in their energy.
Some more subtle ways you can add to a seemingly normal piece of art is by painting a personal sigil with only water on the blank canvas, letting it dry, then painting over it to seal in the intention of the sigil. You could also draw it on the back of the canvas so it is covered while hanging up on the wall. It is easy to use moon water with watercolor paint, or add corresponding essential oils to your paint colors.
Not into fine art? You can easily incorporate art magick into nearly any type of art. The possibilities are truly endless. Here are just a few examples.
Examples of Art Magick
- Carve plant and flower correspondences into your pottery and ceramics
- Incorporate healing crystals into your jewelry making
- Connect with plant and herb magick by making natural dyes for your textile arts
- Burn symbols into wood to match your intention with pyrography
- Add essential oils when candle making to charge the wax with your intent
- Stitch your intention into your knitting and crocheting with knot magick. This is simply where you focus on your intention, visualizing it becoming stronger with each knot.
- Cross-stitching and embroidery can also use knot magick, but here you have more freedom to create symbolic designs.
Tools of the Trade
Whatever art is your medium, you most likely have special tools you use. In witchcraft spells, your tools may be a wand or a cauldron, but for art magick, whatever you are using can be sacred. You may choose to have special tools consecrated for your specific type of art that you only use when you are practicing art magick, such as a paintbrush or knitting needles. You can also bless them in the same way you would the tools at your altar.
To Show or Not To Show
Once you finish your art magick, you may wonder what to do with it. Should you display it or keep it private? What you choose to do with it is entirely up to you and what your art is meant to do. Let’s talk a little about placement. If your intent was around protection, you may want to display it facing a doorway for example. But say you are manifesting success, it may be best to keep a spell like this private while it works. The reasoning behind this is that if you show it to someone else who doesn’t have your best interest in mind, they may send negativity your way and make it harder for the spell to manifest. An in-the-middle placement option could be at your private altar where you will see it every day but most other people will not.
Color Magick Correspondences
Color magick may be one of the most important parts of art magick and it can be used in nearly every example. Here is a cheat sheet of color correspondences that you can quickly reference for the purposes of your own type of art magick.
Red: passion, love, lust, courage, strength, life force
Orange: success, power, encouragement, confidence, authority
Yellow: joy, optimism, creativity, intelligence, solar energy
Green: luck, fertility, abundance, growth, wealth, prosperity
Blue: health, patience, healing, peace, serenity, meditation
Purple: psychic powers, wisdom, hidden knowledge, spiritual power
Pink: friendship, self-love, compassion, empathy, emotional healing
White: purification, clarity, truth
Black: banishing negativity, protection, binding, trances
Gray: balance, intuition, the liminal, lunar energy
Brown: nature or animal-related, grounding, stability
Silver: reflection, channeling, neutrality
Gold: attraction, financial gain, victory, authority
A Note on Perfectionism
Falling victim to perfectionism is almost thought of as a rite of passage to an artist. The starving artist archetype is glamorized. Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert calls perfectionism Fear in High Heels. She says, “I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more than a deep existential angst that says, again and again: I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.”
You do not have to become skilled at this particular form of art. Give yourself permission to fail. Knowing that it doesn’t need to be a certain way, will help you get into the habitat of just creating. Have no expectations for yourself.
Your art magick doesn’t need to look good to be effective. If you enjoy it as a part of your magickal practice and see the results, that is all that matters. Go ahead and give yourself permission to create something imperfect and turn it into magick.
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