The Ugly Art Studio

The Ugly Art Studio A new kind of art studio reimagining artmaking as a tool for health and wellbeing.

Our art kits and workshops are approachable, research-informed, and deeply engaging — supporting stress reduction, brain health, and real human connection 🧡

Remember when you were a kid and you just… made stuff?You drew. You sang. You danced. You made up stories. You glued ran...
09/02/2026

Remember when you were a kid and you just… made stuff?

You drew. You sang. You danced. You made up stories. You glued random things together and called it art. And you probably didn’t spend much time wondering whether you were “good” at it.

Then somewhere along the way to adulthood, a lot of us got a little more self-conscious.

“I’m not creative.”
“I can’t draw.”
“I’m just not an art person.”

Psychobiologist Daisy Fancourt, whose research has hugely influenced the way we think about artmaking at The Ugly Art Studio, recently talked about this on the Hidden Brain podcast.

Getting absorbed in the process. Using your hands. Exploring. Playing around. Making decisions without knowing exactly how something will turn out.

Because here’s the thing: many of the benefits of artmaking come from the experience of doing it.

That’s the kind of artmaking we want more people to experience. 🧡

Don’t mind us, over here product testing for our upcoming flower pressing workshop at the BLOOM Coco Mini market on Sept...
09/01/2026

Don’t mind us, over here product testing for our upcoming flower pressing workshop at the BLOOM Coco Mini market on September 20th! 🌸🌼

Too antsy to wait? Our flower pressing art kits just restocked on our website. Link in bio ✨🧡

Coco Market

08/28/2026

There’s something extra special about seeing our kits out in the world. 🥹🧡

For the first time, you’ll be able to shop The Ugly Art Studio kits in person — and we couldn’t have imagined a better first home for them.

Our kits are officially on the shelves at Nicole B- The House Healer ✨, an amazing new space in College Park built around creativity, community, and feeling good. A pretty perfect place for a little ugly art, if you ask us. 😁

Come explore the space, shop our kits, and celebrate their soft launch on September 12.

We’re so excited to be part of what they’re creating — and to give our Orlando community a new way to discover UAS IRL. 🧡

Give the five-year-old inside you permission to break the rules you were taught.Color outside the lines. Cut the paper c...
08/27/2026

Give the five-year-old inside you permission to break the rules you were taught.

Color outside the lines. Cut the paper crooked. Scribble over the whole thing until it becomes
one big ugly blob.

That is a harder ask than it sounds.

Watch adults at an art table before anyone touches anything. Someone laughs and says they can’t draw. Someone else waits for the person beside them to go first.

Nobody has picked up a brush yet.

The pressure to perform arrives even before the materials do.

That is why Ugly goes first in our name. It settles the question before anyone walks in.

You have already spent the day making decisions and anticipating what everyone else needs.

At the art table, your hands get to move without checking whether they are doing it right.

And if it turns out beautiful?

We will love it all the same.

08/26/2026

Some of the most meaningful artmaking happens when the right people come together to make it possible. 🧡

We recently partnered with MorseLife Health System to provide art kits for a community bereavement gathering they hosted — creating an opportunity for people experiencing grief to come together, make with their hands, and share some of the weight of what they were carrying with others.

This is one of our favorite ways to work with local organizations.

You know your community. You know the people you serve and the kinds of experiences they need. We bring the artmaking piece — thoughtfully designed kits with the materials and guidance needed to make creative engagement approachable, even for someone who might not consider themselves “artistic.”

Together, we can create more opportunities for people to experience artmaking where they already are — in hospices, hospitals, workplaces, community programs, support groups, and the organizations doing meaningful work every day.

We’re grateful to MorseLife for inviting The Ugly Art Studio to be a small part of this gathering. And especially grateful to Kelsey for sharing how the experience was received. 🧡

CreativeWellbeing

You do not have to be a trained artist to reap the benefits of thinking like one. We all have the capacity to think, not...
08/21/2026

You do not have to be a trained artist to reap the benefits of thinking like one. We all have the capacity to think, notice, and engage creatively — and it gets stronger with practice.

One way we strengthen that capacity is through what researchers call an aesthetic mindset: a practiced way of paying attention.

Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, authors of Your Brain on Art, describe this aesthetic mindset in terms of four traits: curiosity, sensory awareness, open-ended exploration, and a drive to make or behold.

And these capacities matter beyond the creative process. Teams with them are more equipped to solve problems creatively, pay closer attention, and recover from stress more readily.

That’s why every workshop we facilitate is designed to nourish the aesthetic mindset through hands-on, low-pressure, process-focused artmaking.

Your team spends time noticing: the movement of watercolor, the resistance of clay, the choice of one image over another. No one is graded on the result. And what they practice in the process — attention, curiosity, presence — gets carried into everyday life.

An aesthetic mindset grows through practice. Artmaking gives us a place to practice it.

08/20/2026

There’s something about working with flowers that feels good. 🌻 And research suggests there may be more happening than we realize.

Studies on flower arranging and interacting creatively with plants have linked the practice with reduced stress and anxiety, improved mood, and even increased self-esteem.

And it makes sense. Flower arranging asks us to slow down, work with our hands, notice color, shape, texture, and composition, and make small creative decisions along the way. There’s no screen. No rush. Just a little pocket of time spent paying attention to what’s right in front of you.

It’s part artmaking. Part connection to nature. And a pretty lovely reminder that supporting our wellbeing doesn’t always have to look like “wellness,” and that artmaking doesn’t always have to be sitting at an easel in a studio 🌼

Research Referenced:

🌻 Reduced stress & anxiety: research on flower-arranging programs (published in OMEGA Journal of Death and Dying)

🌻 Improved mood: research on flowers and emotional wellbeing (published in Evolutionary Psychology)

🌻 Increased self-esteem: research on children participating in flower-arranging programs (published in Journal of People, Plants, and the Environment)

Source: NC State Extension’s Therapeutic Horticulture Program.

08/18/2026

There’s concrete science behind what happens in our bodies when we make art…. and then there’s the experience of what it feels like to make it.

This beautiful piece of poetry came from our CMO, Julie — who, in addition to helping shape The Ugly Art Studio, happens to be a poet. 💜

She wrote it while capturing one of our onsite art-for-wellbeing workshops, where making becomes a chance to shift your attention, work with your hands, and simply experience the process.

We bring these facilitated experiences to healthcare settings, workplaces, and communities — creating more opportunities for people to experience what artmaking can do for our wellbeing.

Thank you, Julie, for putting words to your art experience so beautifully 🧡

Active artmaking doesn’t just feel good. The body literally responds… and it can happen within minutes.In a Drexel Unive...
08/16/2026

Active artmaking doesn’t just feel good. The body literally responds… and it can happen within minutes.

In a Drexel University study, 75% of adults showed a measurable drop in cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, after just 45 minutes of making art — regardless of prior experience.

And that finding is part of a much bigger picture.

In 2019, the World Health Organization synthesized more than 3,000 studies and found a measurable role for the arts across the lifespan.

More recently, a 2026 UCL study linked regular arts engagement to a slower pace of biological aging, comparable to physical activity, with the strongest effect in adults over 40.

From what happens in the body during 45 minutes of making to how we age over decades, the research keeps pointing in the same direction:

Making art is good for us. And you don’t have to be “good” at art to experience the benefits.

08/14/2026

Kinda chic to make something just for the sake of making it.  

Not everything we create needs to become something. It doesn’t need to go on the wall or get preserved in a portfolio. Sometimes, the whole point is the process. 

Make it. Experience it. Let it go. 

When we focus on the process, we realize that art doesn’t have to be good to be good for you.

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Lake Nona, FL

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