Paint and Paper Play

Last year I took the plunge into the wonderful world of mixed media painting. I can tell you it has been a lovely swim. I always had a lot of fear around painting. Not sure why. Actually my misconceptions about it: too hard, too expensive, unforgiving, takes tons of schooling, were completely proven wrong. I now find painting with acrylic paints to be therapeutic, fun, relatively affordable, and very forgiving.

I took my first online class with Mindy Lacefield.  It was a lot of fun but I found that all my paintings looked a lot like Mindy's. She has a very fun, childlike style which I love but I was finding it hard to detour away from Mindy look-a-likes.

Then I did online training with Whitney Freya in her Creatively Fit Coaching. A big part of her training is her Painting Made Easy Program.  I  also had the opportunity to have Whitney come here and do some workshops and training. She taught a fun Paint the Buddha class. I had a group of friends join us and we all made really nice paintings.
Here is my finished Buddha painting.

I was happy with it but afterward I didn't feel inspired to paint more.

Then I took an online class from Flora Bowley. She is a talented painter from Portland. The class was 5 weeks long and I really enjoyed it. Flora really encourages you to paint intuitively. She generally paints colorful, abstract paintings on large canvases. Her class was very freeing but I found the process too long for me and I was craving the satisfaction of completing something I liked. I was afraid that I would also end up with a look-a-like painting but the two I finished were more Vickie than Flora.

But I really didn't really become inspired as a painter until I discovered Community Thrive

and the fabulous painting classes from Mystele Kirkeeng . She teaches a series called Gut Art which is a series of creative habits that she has developed that keep her inspired and she shares them and her painting process with humor, silliness, skill, and incredible openness. I took the 2014 Gut Art and was so inspired that I took the 2013 class which is archived and available to watch and learn from at
your leisure. Since then I have been painting up a storm. I go down to my studio and paint every
chance I get.





Here are some of my recent paintings :

https://www.etsy.com/listing/224123788/angel-series-8