Art therapy for an autistic child:

Art plays an important and influential role in the development, enrichment and treatment of the communication process for autistic children who suffer from developmental disorders or disorders in communication skills.

Art is a language in itself that allows individuals, whether they are children or adolescents, ordinary or people with special needs, an opportunity to express what is inside them and communicate with others. Hence, art, besides being a purifying means, helps to treat individuals’ communication problems, and art works to create a communicative relationship between the individual and the piece of art. And thus begins to expand the scope of contact with the surrounding environment, whether this environment things or individuals.

Artistic activities are among the most important activities offered to autistic children, because they help these children develop their sensory perception through developing their visual perception through a sense of color, line, distance, distance, size, and perception of touch by touching surfaces. Many people suffer from it.

It is also an essential part of skills development programs for children with special needs, and of course, autistic children.

There are several requirements for art therapy that must be met in order for art therapy to achieve its goals, and these requirements include:

1- Material
2- The place
3- Organizing the treatment process
4- Time: The time of each session must be determined according to the condition of each child and according to the method of treatment, individually or collectively
5- Artistic activities, by which we mean those actual activities in art therapy.

6- The materials used: the most important are pastel colors - felts - and water colors - brushes - clay - paper - scissors - and art works - printing - glue.

As for the content of the session, it varies from simplicity to complexity, according to the available materials, the time available, whether the treatment is individual or group, the goal of the treatment, the child's skills, and the program that is applied to him.

Benefits of art therapy in autistic children:

1- It helps to release the expressive and emotional feeling of the child through the development of human interaction between him and the artwork and between the therapist

2- It works to develop the child's awareness of himself and that he is able to produce beautiful and distinguished work

3- Develop the child's sense of himself so that his sense of the environment around him grows

4- It enriches the stereotypical, routine style that autistic people follow in drawing and makes their style softer with regard to manufactured works. Through these methods, the child learns a lot of ways of communicating with the surrounding environment, those ways that many autistic children are deprived of.