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Awakening Creativity Silenced By Self-Doubt
A story about the beauty on the other side of the limiting messages that we tell ourselves.
Recently, I decided to spend more time growing my creativity and focusing on art projects. This reminded me of a long-standing interest in learning how to paint. I’ve often told myself and others that I “don’t use paint.” I took two art courses during my undergraduate studies and managed to avoid using paint as a medium during both based on this idea that I continued to tell myself. I was convinced that painting was “too advanced” for me or that I needed to be better at drawing before I could possibly paint anything worthwhile.
How do we decide what we can and cannot do?
Fast forward eleven years, and I’ve decided to finally give acrylic painting a try. I watched some YouTube videos on acrylic painting until I felt comfortable enough to put some paint on a canvas. Oddly enough, I had a set of acrylic paints, paintbrushes and canvas panels lying around, so I just had to dust them off and get started. The fact that I had all those objects readily available is very interesting to me considering I was living in the world of “I can’t paint” for so long.
From there, I started practicing mixing colors and brush strokes to get a bit more comfortable…