Week 31 of my comfort zone challenge… this week I got my creative juices flowing as I received a painting lesson.

To say I’m not an artist would be a bit of an understatement, despite my mum, sister and uncle all being excellent artists, I got the art genes from my dad. A bit of my art background, during my year 7 art class, I was given a merit for my art drawing with the teacher telling me “I love that you’ve done some abstract art, if I wanted it to look like the object, I’d take a photo”… I did however, try and draw to look like the object. My other infamous piece of artwork as a child is my drawing of a goalkeeper aged 9 (see below). So it’s safe to say I wasn’t blessed with artistic ability.

I can’t remember ever really painting at school, so was keen to have a little lesson and try it out. I contacted Marcia from Creative Art Academy, and managed to arrange a good time to do it. So happy I did, as Marcia was one of the nicest women I’ve ever met. Originally from America, she moved over to England 20 years ago and hasn’t looked back since. Talk about doing something out of your comfort zone… Moving to another country. I had no idea what I wanted to paint really, so left it Marcia to find something suitable. Bless her, she knew I was an Oasis fan, so found me a suitable picture!

So how was she going to make a terrible artist paint? Well we started off by reducing the picture into a grid, and drawing the shapes in each section of the grid on a piece of paper. Once we were happy with the outline, we turned over the piece of paper and coloured the whole back of it in with pencil. Then we put the paper over the canvas and went over the original lines to put it onto the canvas. Marcia was great at helping me find the correct colours, and they key to mixing in the colours was to not let it dry. We were doing a mix media painting, using water colours and oil paints (I think).

Conversation flowed whilst we’d work the magic, and the time just flew. I almost got in concentration when doing it, so much so I forgot to eat my ginger biscuits that were kindly offered! It was extremely therapeutic and I can totally understand why people paint regularly.

I have to say, I never believed I would be able to do a job as I did on this. Marcia is one hell of a teacher. If you’re local to the Hastings area, I implore you to get in touch with Marcia and learn to paint with her. She does all sorts including ceramics and yoga! A lady of many talents!

Just look what I did in two and a half hours with her. Genuinely surprised myself that I could do this, and I’m proud as punch of my painting. I’ve decided to put up my masterpiece on my bedroom wall!