The Start of My Creative Journey

Hello! I’m Natalie Rotman Cote, a retired Software Engineer turned full-time Artist, and I’m just getting started at blogging. Since my blog is about making time for our creativity, being creatively curious, and nurturing our art hobbies, I thought I’d start with sharing about how I got started on my own creative journey. Here goes!

My career choice was developing software. I earned my Computer Science degree and went for it. My career definitely got in the way of any creative practice, so much so that I didn’t even think about creativity for a long time. That said, building software is actually a very creative act. I’m sure many of us have jobs that use our creative muscles daily and we don’t even realize it. Do you see that in your job?

I had a great career but it was stressful with lots of tight deadlines and I needed to make time to relax. At first, that didn’t happen. It wasn’t until I was in my early 30’s that I signed up for a night time beginner drawing class. This definitely took courage as I was an ‘I can’t draw a stick figure’ person.

In my very first drawing class, the instructor set up a still life in the center of the room of … onions. No kidding! How dull is a drawing of onions? Or so I thought. Our easels were set all around the room. We were given charcoal, erasers, a big piece of recycled newsprint paper and were told to draw the onions. We got to it and the results were hilarious! And remarkably similar. We all drew tiny circular onions in the middle of our large pieces of paper, leaving about 90% of the paper blank.

What did we see? We saw little tiny onions far away from us on a table, so that is what we drew.

Next, our instructor said, “Try again. This time fill up the page with the onions”. What? How? They are tiny, I could barely see them. What happened when we filled up our pages was absolute magic! Did they look like onions? Maybe. But did they look like art? Yes!  And it got better and better from there.  I was so proud of myself, that I framed my big piece of newsprint with my sketchy, messy charcoal onions.

I’m here to say that you can be creative as an adult. You just have to give it a try. In my case, I learned to draw as an adult. It didn’t happen overnight, but that first class sparked my curiosity and that started the ball rolling for me. I kept with it and to my surprise, I learned to draw enough to please myself. And that is what counts right?

What would you like to learn? Have you been putting off getting started? Is there an in-person course you’ve been wanting to try? Or are you eyeing an online course but don’t want to commit to it until ‘the time is right’? That time is now. How can you get started on, or continue, your creative practice right now? Take the time to figure that out and get it on your calendar. You are worth the investment in time and money. It will be paid back in happiness, peace and the satisfaction of learning new skills.  I’ll be sharing tons of ideas on just how to do this in future blog posts. Come on along and get creative!