Art Magick: How to become an art witch and unlock your creative power

By Molly Roberts

Would you believe me if I told you that you're a witch? A crafty enchanter born with the abilities to create beauty, read secret languages, heal the heart and attract the attention of the strange and wonderful?

The serendipitous event of this grimoire making its way into your hands is evidence of the buzzing creative power calling out from within you. It's time, Art Witch.

This inspirational grimoire invites you to the shimmering primordial crossroad of the imagination where art and magick meet. Discover the basics of art magick: what art magick could be, how to enrich your life with art magick, how to cast potent spells for yourself, loved ones and community, and enjoy the energizing thrill of a creative magickal practice to call your own.

Learn how to:

• Enchant art tools and materials to produce soulful creations.
• Create sacred spaces, altars and magickal allies for healing, fun and growth.
• Harness color, celestial aid, poetry and personal symbols to create layers of meaning.
• Banish creative doubt and strengthen your intuitive instincts.
• Choose art forms and context for robust spell craft.
• Uncover your gifts and enchant your world with a wide variety of media.

With step-by step instructions and illustrations for over 15 projects, Art Magick reveals how to make an array of bewitched objects and establish your very own art magick practice, including your own pop oracle set, scrying mirrors, magickal mandalas, protection plushies, healing weavings, ensorceled altar boxes, print process sigils, manifestation mobiles, spirit statuary, dream incubation eggs, otherworldly wands and more.

Whether you are a curious beginner, experienced crafter, dabbling magician or recovering creative, Art Witch, Molly Roberts will be your guide as you explore a colorful animated world that lies just beneath the surface—a world where your imagination and personal power collide to create real magick.

Are you ready to awaken the Art Witch within?

• Language: English
• Publisher: David & Charles
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781446381045

Molly Roberts

Molly Roberts is an art witch, musician, magick junkie and artistic mystic with a dedicated following for her powerful lessons in magickal art. After graduating with a BFA in painting, she quickly amassed a loyal and growing YouTube following teaching art magick. Over the past seven years, Molly's videos have inspired thousands of burgeoning artists to create art and magick in their own lives. She teaches hundreds of students monthly through her online courses and Patreon community.

Book preview

THE CALL OF THE ART WITCH

The twisting and turning paths of the artist and witch meet at a primordial crossroad. The pathways are as ancient as memory and as alive as the day you're reading these words. This pulsing confluence of creativity and ritual is well known to the art witch, who is immersed in the wonders of nature, communicates across time and space, explores the caverns of the inner realms and spins magick through creative expression. These makers, tinkerers, ritualists, crafters, and dabblers are called to hear the music of the muses, tend the primal soul, bestow beauty, and engage with a world far more luminous than the one we’ve been taught to see. The art witch is summoned to play in the shimmering in-between spaces where art and magick collide.

The call of the art witch is to step bravely into the humming splendor of your creative potential and reclaim your right to a dynamic, enchanted life. This grimoire making its way into your hands means that you have received such a call.

WILL YOU ANSWER AND AWAKEN THE ART WITCH WITHIN?

WHAT IS MAGICK?

A nameless place buried within our soul craves magick whether we recognize this longing or not. Despite the best efforts of dominant culture to exterminate wonder and systematically crush our imaginative impulses, we still hungrily seek crumbs of the inexplicable, the sublime, and the serendipitous. The most tender human part of us wants to be enchanted and experience magick.

What is magick? Is magick the ability to pluck and play energies like a cosmic rock star? Is magick tapping into our core, knowing that there is more to life than meets the human eye? Is magick an understanding of the hidden signatures of objects and places? Is it using arcane tools and complex rituals at the right time to influence fate? Or is it a catch-all description for unexplained phenomena? Maybe magick is the welling up of anticipation that something weird and interesting is about to happen.

All and none of these things may be true. The real meaning of magick is for witches to discover for themselves through experience.

Definitions of magick differ depending upon the culture, tradition, and preferences of the practitioner. Evasion of strict categorization is to be expected as magick is eternal, slippery, and thrives in the whirlpool of imagination. However, many modern practitioners of magick agree that in its most basic form, magick is performed to communicate a desire and create change in accordance with that desire. Magick is made and met when the heart, mind, will, and soul all play together in unison.

A spell is a magickal act or series of actions intended to influence the caster, environments, objects, spiritual entities, or other people. One might cast a spell to draw in what is desired or repel that which is unwanted. Charms, candle work, sigils, prayers, and amulets are examples of common forms of spell work. Spells may be simple or elaborate, carefully planned or improvised, shrouded in obscurity or shared publicly for the benefit of many.

WHAT IS ART MAGICK?

Art magick is the practice of using art media and art forms to create changes on the inner and outer world of the witch. By ascribing meaning to each step of our work and actively participating with our environments, we tap into the natural spell-like structure of the creative process and make enchanted art objects to transform our lives.

An enchanted object or place has a vibrant life all its own. To be enchanted is to be fascinated, wooed, captivated, and delighted. Art magick spells are designed to enchant both the art witch and the object of our attention. By offering our work devoted concentration and the aid of our playful genius, we can sing our creative projects full of purpose, poetry, and power. Art magick is a method and may be molded to fit the needs of the individual witch and enhance any existing magickal path or tradition.

HOW ART AND MAGICK WORK TOGETHER

Art and magick are the gleaming twins born at the dawn of imagination. The links between magick and art can be seen everywhere: from shadowy murals in sacred caves to the meticulous notebooks of renaissance mages, from roadside folk art assemblages to sculptures in art museums all over the world. The instinctual gems of art and magick are alive in our DNA and their sparks crackle in our marrow to this day. Art and magick speak to our innate nature as makers and active participants in a living universe.

Art and magick share many common methods and aspirations. Sometimes the two bleed together like watercolors and become indistinguishable from one another. Both art and magick can be routes to healing, beauty, communication, illumination, initiation, commemoration, storytelling, meditation, activism, play, and spiritual sustenance.

If we look carefully at the artist and the witch, we’ll discover their gnarled roots draw the waters of inspiration from the same deep timeless well. Both artist and witch use special tools, supplies, and symbols to create items that grow beyond the sum of their parts, to take on new meaning and evolve over time. The witch and the artist create with the intent to reach the soul through images, storytelling, and sensual experience. Both may lean into their craft for catharsis; one whipping paint on the canvas to exorcise demons and the other burning banishing herbs under a dark moon. The nature of their undertakings is dreamlike, and both are lead by intuition and instinct to navigate through their creative odyssey.

Art and magick both emanate the strange and alluring perfume of dabbling in the unknown, unusual, and unbelievable in the face of the measurable, acceptable, and rational. In popular culture, artists and magicians are often cast as eccentrics and outsiders who operate in ways their communities don’t understand.

Perhaps the most important commonality these figures share is they create what they want to see in the world. Art and magick bring form to desire. As creators and makers of culture, these archetypal figures ask us to witness ourselves and the world with new vision. The artist and the witch are alchemists who cook gross materials to reveal truths and instigate transformation. If pursued with passion, art and magick can lead us to discovering our own philosopher’s stone in the form of a colorful, fulfilling creative life of extraordinary substance.

WAYS TO USE ART MAGICK IN YOUR LIFE

Art magick is versatile and may be applied to any sphere of life. Wellness, relationships, finances, love, home, career, community, healing, creativity, and spiritual growth are all approachable through art magick.

HOW TO CAST SUCCESSFUL ART SPELLS

To weave a potent spell, the art witch considers several key strands and braids them together