From a young age, I have enjoyed art, when it was time to pick my options at secondary school, Pottery was one of my ‘O’ Level choices. After trying pottery for a while, I lost interest in it and moved across to painting and drawing instead. This turned out to be a bad move, my first exam piece was a pencil drawing of a half-peeled orange, my drawing was good, and my teacher was pleased with it.

The second exam piece was to draw and paint a picture to illustrate a descriptive line from a book. This is where it all fell apart, my drawing was reasonable but as soon as I began painting I had a bad feeling about it. Turns out I was right, my painting looked like something a junior school child would have done and it brought my grade down really low. I can’t remember what the grade was, I think I have subconsciously erased it from my memory.

When Megan and Josh were both at school, there were art classes at our local community centre, they were free so I decided to have another go. These attempts were much better, I learned more about observational drawing and how to use pastels, watercolours and charcoal.

Since then I have had the odd dabble with art work and although I often feel I would like to pick up the brushes and paints, it has not come to anything.

I have been noticing on Facebook that there is a new art form, Art Journaling, it looked fascinating, and when I browsed through the topic on Pinterest, there are thousands of inspiring images of peoples work.

I noticed an advertisement in the Workaid Shop for a six week Art Journaling Course, I mentioned it to my daughter Megan and we decided we would go together. The first session was last Saturday. We were given a selection of various coloured pens, inks and a selection of stencil shapes and letters as well as water, sponges and cloths.

Isabel, our tutor showed us some techniques for using the materials and we all started to create our first journal page. Megan and I really enjoyed the class, Megan did some more pages in her journal on Sunday but I haven’t picked mine up until today.

These are the three pages I did on Saturday.

I will be returning to work part time tomorrow (Thursday), I am really excited about it, it is another step towards normality and I am looking forward to seeing my colleagues and getting back in to the routine.

So this inspired me to get out the watercolours and brushes and paint a journal page to celebrate. This is my painting,