I’ve gotten ahead in my lesson planning enough that I can finally work on my coloring book project again. This project is my passion, it means a lot to me. I got the idea in February of 2020. I had stopped drawing completely for over a decade and a half, and stiffness and poor eyesight made it hard to pick up again. Playing with my daughter’s digital drawing tablet let me zoom in on lines and be able to hit undo, making art accessible. So, I got my own.

At the same time, I hit a long term goal that had a reward attached. I once tried to start a collection of carnivorous plants and killed them all, quite quickly. I promised myself that if I got a Venus Flytrap to go into and come out of dormancy, then propagated it, I would allow myself to try again. It took almost a decade of buying them when they showed up in the fall in grocery stores, but it finally happened. In the excitement of watching my baby flytraps grow while drawing again, the coloring book idea became inevitable. The project itself justified me making a nice starter collection a priority, and has given me reason to not give up when my little garden has its setbacks.

This is why my project is going so slowly, I’m meandering through while I gain experience growing and researching the plants, as well as allowing myself time to regain my drawing skills and experiment with style and technique. It’s been frustrating how long it has taken me, but I love sitting in my little carnivorous garden sketching, so I’ve been able to tell myself that it will happen eventually. After a year with the tablet, I was able to use pencil and paper again, letting me brush off skills that have been rusty way too long. Now, I’ve finally gotten brave enough to begin adding ink. No single page is done yet, some have still barely been worked on, but many of them are to the point that I no longer have to worry about if I will be able to get the lines right, the fear of the tiny mistakes I still make are no longer enough to hold me back, and I’m able to celebrate the confidence I’ve had to make myself feel to get to this point.