I drew a lizard when I was in elementary school, and then I cried. That was when I determined, a bad decision on my part, that art was not for me. I was enrolled in an after school art program, and that particular afternoon the fifth-grade math teacher brought his classroom lizard in for us to draw. I remember looking around at how awesome everyone else’s drawing was, and mine was terrible.
My older brother picked me up from school that day. He did his best to cheer me up, telling me that my drawing was good. But I knew it was terrible.
I tried other after school programs over the years–dance, musical theater, drama, journalism, and even chess club for half a second. But I never tried art again, all because of that poorly drawn lizard.
If you told 10-year-old Whytney, that in her 30s she’d spend her free time painting, and what she created, she would like…well there’d be a huge look of disbelief on her face. I wrote off art as one of those things I just couldn’t do. But two decades later, it’s exactly what I do, along with so many other things that never crossed my mind.
When I was a kid, I spent so much time comparing what I could do to what others were doing. I couldn’t do it as well as them, therefore there was no point in doing it at all. You begin to see things differently as an adult though, and this was one of those things.
I didn’t jump straight into painting on blank canvasses. I worked my way up and was kind of pushed into it. I started doing paint by number before the pandemic in the summer of 2019, but I think this journey began way before that. When I remember really getting into just sitting with colored pencils and coloring again, it was in college. My roommate and I decided to decorate our dorm door with Disney characters that we colored ourselves. I was very strict in adhering to the original Disney styling (my roomie was dumfounded that i took the time to actually use a white colored pencil to color Mulan’s face; it was the image of her when she was all dressed up to see the matchmaker).
Coloring in college was a nice way to relieve stress and focus on something other than our impending adulthood. I took up the practice again a few years later. I was still coloring Disney characters but I also started to pick up adult coloring books and mandalas. And just like in college, the coloring helped relieve stress. I brought my colored pencils and books to work, and during my lunch break I’d color.
Then one day in the summer of 2019, it might have been Prime Day I’m not really sure, I came across a couple of paint by number kits that were on sale and I thought, why not. The rest is history. I don’t know how many paint by numbers I’ve done, or how many are currently hanging in my apartment. But they became my thing over the next couple of years. Friends gave them to me as gifts and those gifts were greatly appreciated.
I only ever thought I’d do paint by numbers, or instructional wine and paint nights. I did not dare to believe I could come up with anything meaningful to paint on a blank canvas. But for my birthday a couple of years ago (at the beginning of the pandemic), I received something different. My friend gave me a gift bag of paint and blank stretched canvases. I was intimidated, and unsure what to do with this gift. I wanted what I painted to be perfect, so I looked up instructional videos on how to paint different things, mostly flowers. I tried some of those techniques, but what I ended up liking the most didn’t come from any of those instructions. The first thing I painted, that I really loved was from a photo shoot of the poet Amanda Gorman. I liked it so much, I painted another image from a different photo shoot.
I guess all of this is to say art doesn’t have to be perfect (no matter how hard I am on myself about what I’m trying to create); it should just be something fun.
