Photo by Sema Martin on Unsplash

Have you ever gotten up in the morning and decided this is it! Today is the day I start achieving my goals, only to jump from one obstacle to another? I know what Super Mario felt like. Coins improve your life, but you'll hit your head against the wall a lot in the process of earning them. The Princess is always in another castle. Sometimes you'll fall in little potholes, but you need to get up and start again. I can go on and on with comparisons, but you get the gist. The moment we decide we want to become artists, we get hit with all kinds of obstacles.

The first obstacle being our inner critic. Oh, this guy can be tough to overcome. Let's give it a name: Inny! Inny decides that you can't draw, you don't have talent, you won't ever reach Michelangelo status, and on and on Inny goes. In addition to Inny's nagging, we start looking for validation from other places because, let's face it, Inny is no help! Instead of being stuck on this crazy train, start harnessing your inner resilience. Learn that mistakes are an essential part of the process, and you can always bounce back better than before.  Learn to be audacious and bold in your art!

When I first started to paint, I could be my worst enemy! I sabotaged myself repeatedly, and I would let emotions get in my way. When I started a piece, I went in with a beautiful idea in my head, and it was something else entirely on paper. What?? The worst part was that whenever I failed to achieve my goals, I would give up and berate myself for not achieving good art. Now I understand that it's not that I couldn't get my vision down on canvas; it was that I had too high of expectations from the beginning. It's like that saying, "My eyes are bigger than my stomach"! It wasn't until I started to narrow down my focus and have a starting point that I began to see my dreams come into reality. How did I do this? Below I'll give you the methods I used to get going in the right direction.

Join me!

Margie Resto

Founder

Wanderlust Collective