Painting has been one of my favourite ways to express myself in recent years. Growing up I don’t remember making a ton of paintings, but I used to love to draw and colour and make crafts. I think back then I used to think I wasn’t “good enough” to paint on a canvas. That sounds so crazy to me now! Honestly a great deal of my insecurity with art came from comparing myself to others at school.

In high school I got really into photography. I always had a camera with me wherever I went, and my love for capturing my surroundings through a lens took off. Since then I haven’t really stopped taking pictures. Sure, there have been times where I’ve not thought about photography all that much, but the urge to grab a camera always returns.

For a while I had these preconceived notions about what makes an artist. I thought that I couldn’t be an artist because I was merely capturing the way light bounced off of objects instead of mixing colours on a paint palette and applying them to a canvas to recreate what I saw. Even when I was doing my first 365 project on Flickr I compared my own photos to others on the website and still couldn’t see mine as art! It’s taken a lot of time to appreciate that there are just as many different types of art as there are ways to interpret them.

These days I enjoy putting a brush to a canvas or some paper to help quiet my mind and give my hands something to do. Seeing colours harmonising and blending together is incredibly soothing, and at the end of it I usually feel a sense of accomplishment because it’s so satisfying to see it all come together.

Today I did some painting just for myself. I had an old canvas I had used for one of the online art classes I taught last year and a bunch of leftover paint that I had mixed up in little tubs, so I combined them and added a little glitter. Boom! Art.

See? That wasn’t so bad.

While I was up in the office painting, it also gave me time to notice that the curtains had turned grey from soot! So I chucked them in the wash a couple of times and now they’re looking considerably more bright. Sometimes you don’t even notice things like that until you take a second glance.