A Whole New Level and hopefully a whole new me!

Here are my completed week 2 assignments in the Art, Heart and Healing course I'm taking.  I really got a lot out of this healing exercise. The first page was to depict what we wish could have been for our young selves.  The second was to take a childhood trauma and turn it into what we wish it could have been. Growing up, my home life was absolutely wonderful with lots of love and feelings of safety and security. It wasnt until I went to school for the first time and experienced ridicule, humiliation and embarassment for the first time in my life that I realized the rest of the world was a scary place. That had a huge impact on me. I spent the rest of my growing up years keeping my mouth shut, doing everything I could to avoid drawing attention to myself, being too afraid to try anything or risk anything and living in constant fear of ridicule and humiliation. Even today I struggle with anxiety and leave the safety of my home as little as possible. It wasnt until this lesson that I really, truly connected the two. I knew I was a frightened little kid and a stressed out teenager and I could never connect that to my truly wonderful home life.
I'm really learning alot about myself through this course and my art is really being taken to a whole new level.  I'm creating things I never dreamed I could but always wanted to.  Its so thrilling and scary all at once.

New Directions

I'm really feeling compelled to step out in directions I've never gone before with my art and it feels really good.  I always said I could do just about anything but paint and yet here I am painting.  I've avoided drawing faces for so long and yet here I am...drawing faces...that I actually like! 

I took some of the things I've learned from the Art, Heart and Healing course and put them into some small 5 X 5 canvases that I found a while back.  I really love how they turned out.  I put them in a friend's booth at a craft sale today and actually sold a couple.  Always a good thing!  I'll try putting the rest on Etsy.com and see if I can sell anymore. 

I have some ideas for some more new things I want to try and test the waters with.  I hope to have some done in time for an Open House I want to have for the holidays.

Here are the canvases...