BLIND SELF PORTRAIT Blindfold Portrait Session — The Atlas Creative Circle Saturday 6 June 2026 · Online Livestream
What do you see about yourself when you stop trying to look good?
Blind Self Portrait is an online expressive arts therapy workshop designed to help participants soften self-judgment, loosen perfectionism, and reconnect with presence through creative practice. Held inside The Atlas Creative Circle, this session uses blindfold portraiture and blind-contour drawing to shift the focus from appearance to sensation, honesty, and self-permission. It sits within the Term 2 field of clarity, softening, and reorientation, and is held as a trauma-informed, non-performance-based creative space.
EARLY BIRD PRICE ENDS 4.04.2026 For those who want the ATLAS journey from anywhere — a gentle, steady rhythm of creative mapping and regulation. 16 online sessions across the year. Payment Options: $80 per term
There is a version of self-expression many people know well: articulate, capable, composed — and still carefully managed.
This workshop is for the person who communicates clearly but still hides inside roles, self-editing, or the quiet pressure to appear “together.” Blind Self Portrait offers a gentle interruption to that pattern.
With eyes closed, covered, or turned away from the page, participants are guided through a portrait process that removes the usual urge to control how they look. What emerges is not about artistic skill or resemblance. It is about contact. Presence. Permission. The drawing becomes a meeting point between body, image, and truth.
Often, what is drawn without watching reveals something more honest than what is drawn while performing.
Celestial timing
Held between the Sagittarius Full Moon and the Gemini New Moon, this session supports the bridge between truth and language by loosening image-management, self-correction, and the pressure to “get it right.” In the wider arc of Term 2, this workshop helps participants move from brave truth-telling into more authentic self-expression.
What happens in the session
This online creative arts therapy workshop includes:
regulation check-in and somatic arrival
blindfold or blind-contour self-portrait process
observation of the inner voice that judges, corrects, or hides
Q&A and closing ritual
What participants may discover
By the end of this session, participants are supported to:
experience presence without performance
notice one inner voice that edits or controls self-expression
sit with imperfection as information rather than failure
feel more genuine, less managed, and more emotionally honest
identify one way they want to show up more truthfully in the coming fortnight
This session draws naturally from the Atlas modalities of symbolic self-portraiture and blind contour emotional sculpting, alongside regulation-based creative practice.
Who this is for
This workshop is especially suited to people who are:
emotionally full but tired of over-explaining themselves
burnt out from performing competence
sensitive, high-capacity, and moving through transition
craving a non-verbal path into clarity
wanting expressive arts therapy, self-reflection, and nervous-system support without pressure to “make good art”
No art experience is needed. The process is the practice.
Materials for the online session
Simple household materials are enough:
plain paper or sketchbook
pen, marker, pencil, or charcoal
optional blindfold, scarf, or closed eyes
optional coloured pencils, pastels, or paints for reflection after the portrait
For online Atlas sessions, simple materials are always considered sufficient.
Why this workshop matters
In a culture that rewards image, polish, and constant self-management, Blind Self Portrait becomes a restorative act. It helps participants step out of visual control and into embodied honesty. Rather than asking, How do I appear? the process asks, What do I notice? What do I feel? What happens when I stop managing myself for a moment?
This is expressive arts therapy as self-contact — not self-improvement through performance, but self-recognition through creative presence.
Bridge into the next session
This workshop also prepares the ground for the next Atlas sanctuary session, where unscripted seeing becomes unscripted language through marbling and story work