What is the difference between art therapy and art activities?

The difference is not the materials. Art therapy is grounded in psychotherapeutic theory, works with the process of making rather than the product, holds the image inside a therapeutic relationship, and carries ethical obligations around consent, custody of the work, interpretation and display that a recreational art activity does not.

Do I need to be good at art to do art therapy training?

No. Art Therapy Foundations assumes no artistic skill and no prior art therapy training. The course is about how creative processes work therapeutically rather than about technique.

Why should you not praise a client's artwork?

Praise moves the goal toward making pleasing pictures. Art therapy is oriented to what happens while the work is being made, including hesitation, colour choices, covering over and destruction, rather than to the quality of the finished product.

Can I use art in my practice if I am not an art therapist?

Yes. Using drawing to help a child describe their week is a legitimate and useful technique. The honest position is to know which you are doing and to say so, because describing a creative technique as art therapy to a family, funder or report reader is a claim that may not be supportable.

What are the ethics of art therapy?

Key obligations include real informed consent about what happens to the work, clarity about custody and storage of images, refusing to impose interpretations because meaning belongs to the maker, planning for the fact that image-making reaches difficult material quickly, and never displaying or sharing work without explicit agreement.

Art therapy

Art therapy or just art activities? What actually makes it therapy

By the AkindaCo education team · Adelaide, South Australia

Almost every practitioner who works with children has, at some point, pushed paper and textas across the table because talking was not getting anywhere. Often it helps. That does not make it art therapy.

The distinction matters, and not for territorial reasons. It matters because the things that make art therapeutic are also the things that make it risky when handled without a framework.

It is not about the materials

You can do art therapy with a biro on the back of an envelope, and you can run a beautifully resourced art activity that is not therapy at all. Nothing about the quality of the paint tells you which one is happening.

Four things do.

1. The theory underneath

Art therapy is grounded in psychotherapeutic theory. It draws on frameworks from psychotherapy, trauma-informed practice and human development, and it has a rationale for why image-making does what it does. Without that, you are making a guess about what you are looking at.

That rationale matters most when something unexpected appears on the page. A practitioner with a framework has somewhere to put it. A practitioner without one has an interpretation, which is a very different and much more dangerous thing.

2. Process over product

A recreational art activity is usually oriented to the thing that gets made. A good outcome is a nice picture, and praise is the natural response.

Art therapy is oriented to what happens while it is being made. The hesitation before the first mark. The colour chosen and then covered over. The decision to destroy it. The moment the person starts talking because their hands are busy and eye contact is no longer required. The image is evidence of a process, not the point of it.

This is also why praise can be counterproductive. Telling someone their drawing is lovely shifts the goal to making lovely drawings.

3. The relationship

In art therapy there are three participants: the person, the therapist, and the image. The image is not a test to be scored. It sits between two people who are both looking at it, and it lets difficult material be discussed at one remove.

That triangle is precisely what makes it valuable for people who find direct conversation hard, including many children, many autistic people, and anyone for whom words came late or came loaded.

4. The ethics

This is the part most often missed. Art therapy carries obligations that a craft activity does not:

Consent that is real. The person needs to know what will happen to what they make, before they make it.
Custody of the work. Who owns it, where it is stored, who else sees it, what happens at the end of therapy.
Not interpreting. Reading meaning into an image and handing that reading to the person is not analysis, it is imposition. The meaning belongs to the maker.
Knowing what you have opened. Image-making reaches material faster than talking does, which is useful and is exactly why you need a plan for closing the session.
Display. A drawing pinned on a wall or shown to a parent without explicit agreement is a confidentiality breach, even when it looks like celebration.

So can I use art in my practice?

Yes, and you should. Creative work belongs in far more practice than it currently sits in. The honest position is simply to know which you are doing and to say so.

Using drawing to help a child describe their week is a legitimate and useful technique. It is not the same as art therapy, and describing it as art therapy to a family, a funder or a report reader is a claim you may not be able to support.

Where art therapy and behaviour support meet

At AkindaCo the two sit close together. Several of our art therapists also work in Positive Behaviour Support, where a child who cannot yet say what happened can very often draw the shape of it. Understanding the function of a behaviour and understanding what a child puts on paper are more related than the two literatures suggest.

Learning the framework

AkindaCo runs Art Therapy Foundations, a two-day introductory course at locations across Adelaide. It covers the theoretical, psychological and ethical foundations of art therapy alongside practical skill development, how art-making supports emotional expression, regulation and meaning-making across the lifespan, and exactly this distinction between art therapy, clinical therapy and recreational art.

You do not need to be able to draw, and no prior art therapy training is assumed. Related reading: family therapy compared with individual therapy.

← Back to the training blog