When I was a child, I used to love art. Drawing and painting were so much fun and by my tween years, I was getting pretty decent at it. My grade 8 teacher often wanted to keep my work for examples for the following years. I would have loved to take art classes in high school but music was too consuming of a force for me and I only had so much room in my schedule. I briefly picked up sketching again in my first year of university as we often had to draw what we saw in our Biology 110 lab. I put that aside too though when I was finished and that’s pretty much where my life as an artist ended. While I was grateful to have photography in my life, there’s something special about recreating something with just a pencil or a few colors of paint.

Calligraphy is another art that I’ve always thought was interesting. Many years ago, I bought a discount book about calligraphy and actually spent some time learning the chancery style. But I always saw these gorgeous words and phrases on Pinterest and really wanted to learn more styles. An opportunity popped up during this pandemic and I purchased a membership to Loveleigh Loops where I have been slowly but surely learning faux calligraphy and modern brush pen calligraphy. It was through them that a random email about a series of free art classes came into my inbox.

I have learned to become very skeptical of free workshops. They’re usually just a bragging session for the person running the workshop then, a couple of semi-helpful tips followed by a very long sales pitch. But I signed up for the Creative Retreat Live anyway on The Pigeon Letters website after peeking at the schedule list. Wow, am I ever glad I did! Classes included digital art, watercolor, calligraphy, and even artistic meditation among many others. Sure it was tricky to make it to everything live but knowing what I know now, I probably would have paid to have longer access to the videos.

I have been hoarding art supplies for a while now hoping to get the chance to learn how to use them. The artists would often say that you didn’t need the exact same supplies so I pulled out what I had and tried my first bit of watercolor art for the first time in decades.

Okay, I’m definitely not winning any awards for my first project but it was a lot of fun. I had trouble figuring out what we were doing at first but then it all clicked into place and I thought, ‘hey, this is cool!’

Another class was a bit more technical as we were guided through ways of painting flowers. This was wonderfully meditative because nothing had to be right. It was just meditatively practicing to paint something simple but pretty. Unfortunately, I bombed pretty hard on another flower picture this time, using brush pens instead of watercolor. But learned an interesting painting technique and that was the fun part.

One of the things I heard many of the artists say is, “Trust the process.” Watercolor definitely has its quirks. Starting with a wet barely colored background seems weird and many of my paintings started by looking very ugly or weird. But layer after layer of paint and color as well as a few details at the end and suddenly, you have something that actually looks like what is supposed to. There’s definitely a metaphor for life in that!

I loved some of the more whimsical workshops too like painting cakes and happy little pots. It’s so easy to see how someone could get lost for an hour or two just swirling some paint around on a piece of paper.

I had no idea that painting cakes could be so fun!

One of my favorite things about the retreat was just the sense of ‘You can do this!’ spirit of the artists. The supportive environment really made it easy for someone like me to get started and just getting started is something that I find intensely scary. “Trust the process”, might just become my motto for 2022!

The Creative Retreat Live was held this year from February 25th to March 5th. Apparently, this is not their first year so I will definitely be keeping my eyes open when the signup emails come next year. And a massive thank you to Peggy at thepigeonletters.com for the retreat. It was clearly a lot of work but I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels transformed by it!