I started coloring again...

I started coloring again.

I feel like if I really wanted to, I could stop this post with that sentence but I won't. Last year, I went through one of the most difficult, "survival" periods of my adult life so far and it stunted my creativity. Usually, hardships are supposed to inspire an artist, right? Except this hardship stopped my creation and pushed surviving. Glad to say, I'm firmly out of that place now and I am so grateful for it. I don't wish to go back but now being out of it, my creativity has come back tenfold. I'm writing again, creating my 'Sonder' show pitch deck and upon something said in passing, coloring again. I haven't colored since I was a little girl. But once it was recently said to me, I couldn't get it out of my head. For months now I wanted to get back into painting, maybe pottery but it didn't feel quite right yet. Then came coloring.

I've always been a creative, artistic mind- feeling everything very deeply- and what follows that sensitivity is also an eye for color and how it affects the mood of every single thing but for some reason, I never associated coloring with 'art' or being an 'adult'. I've seen for months how coloring is proven to relax us, keep us in the moment, keep us creative but I felt juvenile and that just showed me how we tend to create our own boxes, even as artists.

So, I'm coloring again and I haven't been able to stop and I'm now seeing the waterfall effects of it. It's threading itself through all of my creative endeavors and reminding me that the world around us is art, is colors and is sometimes the simplest things right in front of us. To quote Nigel in "The Devil Wears Prada": "and what they did, what they created was greater than art because you live your life in it." Of course, in the movie he's talking about fashion but it follows the same idea. Just like Andy, the things we forget about, the art we forget about is so deeply ingrained we forget it's there. Just like coloring. 🎨🧿​