The benefits of drawing for adults and seniors: what research shows

Making art can lower stress. In one study, three in four adults had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol after 45 minutes of making art, whatever their experience.

In a 2016 pilot study in the United States, 39 adults aged 18 to 59 spent 45 minutes making art with collage, modelling clay or markers. Cortisol fell for about 75 percent of them, and prior experience of making art made no difference to the result (Kaimal et al., 2016 (opens in a new tab)).

A 2018 review of 37 studies of art, music, dance and drama, most of them randomised trials, found that 81 percent reported lower stress (Martin et al., 2018 (opens in a new tab)).

Across 16 countries, among 93,263 people aged 65 and over, having a hobby, from the arts and crafts to reading, games and gardening, was linked with fewer symptoms of depression and with greater happiness and life satisfaction (Mak et al., 2023 (opens in a new tab)).

Retirees often come to Elena Ant for the creative state itself: after a life given to work and family, they look for calm, beauty, and time absorbed in a world of their own.

In two studies, older beginners who took drawing and painting classes showed measurable changes in brain activity, and in one, those changes were linked with resilience to stress.

In a 2014 study in Nuremberg, Germany, 28 people who had retired within the previous three years were randomly assigned to one of two courses, two hours a week for 10 weeks. Half took an art class in which an artist trained as an art educator taught drawing and painting; half analysed works of art in a museum (Bolwerk et al., 2014 (opens in a new tab)).

Brain scans showed that a hub of the brain’s resting network became more widely connected to frontal and parietal areas in the group that made art than in the museum group. In the art group, these connections were linked with resilience to stress (Bolwerk et al., 2014 (opens in a new tab)).

In Toronto, older adults with little experience of art took 36 one-hour classes over three months, learning basic drawing and painting and painting landscapes, still lifes and self-portraits. Their brain responses to a visual task, measured by EEG, changed more than in a music group or a group without classes (Alain et al., 2019 (opens in a new tab)).

No. Older beginners learn new skills, and learning a demanding new skill can itself be good for memory.

In a US trial, 221 adults aged 60 to 90 spent about 16 hours a week for three months learning digital photography, quilting, or both. Their memory improved compared with people who socialised or did undemanding tasks (Park et al., 2014 (opens in a new tab)).

Elena Ant came back to drawing herself at about fifty, after years away from it, and her skills returned within about a year. Her students today include retirees in their sixties and seventies, who start from the basics: line, form, light and shadow, tone and composition.

Drawing something is a powerful way to remember it, and the benefit was larger in older adults than in younger ones. It also helped people with probable dementia.

In experiments at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, younger and older adults saw 30 words and either drew each one or wrote it out. They remembered more of the words they had drawn, and the advantage was larger for older adults. Drawing also narrowed the gap between older and younger adults in how well they recollected the words (Meade et al., 2018 (opens in a new tab)).

In a follow-up, people with probable dementia and healthy older adults drew or wrote out each word for 40 seconds. Both groups recalled and recognised the drawn words better (Meade et al., 2020 (opens in a new tab)).

The researchers suggest that drawing works because it joins meaning, a picture and a movement of the hand in one memory (Fernandes et al., 2018 (opens in a new tab)), and because it relies on visual areas of the brain that hold up relatively well with age (Meade et al., 2020 (opens in a new tab)).

Studies link artistic, creative and mentally stimulating activities in middle and later life with a lower risk of memory problems, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

In the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging in Minnesota, 256 people aged 85 and over were followed for about four years. Those who reported artistic activities in both middle and later life were less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment, a stage of memory and thinking problems that can come before dementia (Roberts et al., 2015 (opens in a new tab)).

In the same study, among 2,000 people aged 70 and over followed for about five years, craft activities in later life were linked with a lower risk of mild cognitive impairment. The more kinds of mentally stimulating activity people took part in, the lower their risk (Krell-Roesch et al., 2019 (opens in a new tab)).

In Australia, among 10,318 people aged 70 and over followed for up to 10 years, more frequent creative activity, a group that included crafts, woodwork and painting or drawing, was linked with a lower risk of dementia (Wu et al., 2023 (opens in a new tab)).

A 2022 review of 38 long-term studies, with more than two million people, found that cognitive, physical and social leisure activities were all linked with a lower risk of dementia, and cognitive activities with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease (Su et al., 2022 (opens in a new tab)).

The 2024 Lancet Commission on dementia prevention estimates that 14 risk factors that can be changed, among them less education, depression, infrequent social contact and physical inactivity, account for nearly half of dementia. It advises being cognitively, physically and socially active in mid and later life (Livingston et al., 2024 (opens in a new tab)).

Art sessions can make the moment better: people living with dementia showed more interest, attention and pleasure during them, and drawing helped them remember words.

In England and Wales, 125 people with mild to severe dementia took part in a 12-week visual-art programme. Compared with a non-art activity, they showed more interest, attention, pleasure and self-esteem, and less sadness, during the sessions, and their carers reported better quality of life (Windle et al., 2018 (opens in a new tab)).

Drawing can also help as a memory aid: people with probable dementia remembered words better when they drew them (Meade et al., 2020 (opens in a new tab)). If you care for someone living with dementia, ask their doctor or care team about arts activities that suit them.

No. Art therapy is a form of psychotherapy delivered by trained art therapists. Elena Ant’s lessons teach drawing and painting.

The Cochrane review of art therapy for dementia quotes the British Association of Art Therapists, which defines art therapy as “a form of psychotherapy that uses art media as its primary mode of communication” (Deshmukh et al., 2018 (opens in a new tab)).

Elena Ant is an artist and art teacher. Her lessons teach the skills of drawing and painting, step by step, and are not a treatment for any condition.