Packing for Adventure

I don’t always feel like a creative person, even though I try to be.

My brain doesn’t naturally work in a “make something out of thin air” kind of way. I’m not great at inventing images, scenes, or backgrounds from nothing. But give me something to look at, such as a photo, a reference, a starting point, then I can recreate surprisingly well. I can draw a fairly realistic portrait if I have a picture to work from. But when I try to create something from thin air, my mind draws a blank. Just a big fuzzy nothing.

A while ago, we graduated our daughter from her crib to a real bed. My husband built a beautiful bed frame and headboard, and I was assigned the task of painting. We originally planned an elaborate scene: mountains, a castle, maybe even a unicorn. It quickly became obvious that this was more ambitious than I had time for. The castle and hills were scrapped, and I decided to just have it be a unicorn on a mountain backdrop.

Chris used his CNC machine to cut out unicorn shapes, and then they sat. For over a year.

They sat because I was overwhelmed. I wanted them to be right, and without a clear vision in my head, I kept putting it off. Every time I thought about painting them, I felt stuck.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally did it.

I found a few unicorn images online to use as references, took a deep breath, and started painting. Chris had made two unicorns in different sizes because he wasn’t sure which would work best, so I painted both.

Now it’s a mommy unicorn and a daughter unicorn, and Mae is thrilled.

That’s how I’m creative. It’s less “burst of inspiration” and more “two years of procrastination followed by a weekend of confidence.” In this case, I think it was worth the wait!

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