I love to paint, but I’m not a skilled artist. I’ve been to just enough paint and sip parties to call myself a dabbler. I’ve bought canvases, paints, and tools so that I can paint (and sip) at home. Back in February, I decided to host a paint night, and I was determined that I was going to paint a gnome. I knew I couldn’t do it without looking some ideas up online, but I was determined!
Determination led to looking at a lot of pictures of gnome paintings on Google Images. I eventually found a picture of the one above while searching “Gnome Sweet Gnome”, and I decided that this was the gnome I was going to paint. Step one was figuring out how I was going to get the gnome from the picture on my phone to the canvas. In the past, I had printed out the object I planned to paint and traced it onto the canvas. This time that didn’t seem like the best course of action. This led to deciding that I was going to have to attempt drawing it by hand (also not a big skill of mine). Long story short, I drew the gnome by hand, and painted it all myself! The end result was the gnome in the picture above.
So what is the point of my little gnome story?
The first point to my gnome story is that you never know what you can achieve if you don’t try. It would’ve been really easy to have talked myself out of attempting to draw and paint my gnome based on my previous perceptions about my artistic ability. This time I didn’t talk myself out of trying, and I am still amazed two months later at the gnome that I created myself!
The second point to my gnome story is that great joy can be found in the simplest things. When I look at my gnome painting, I can’t help but smile. I think it is important for all of us to having something that we can look at and smile every time we look at it. This thing could be a picture of a vacation, a ticket stub from a movie, a favorite book cover, etc. What the object is doesn’t matter; what matters is the feeling of joy that it provides.
Those are the points of my gnome story. What’s your gnome story?
XOXO,
The Great Kaysby
The Great Kaysby 