Ladies Art group start up...

 Have started a monthly Saturday morning art group for women interested in having a creative spice in their lives. It all started last weekend when a couple of friends invited me and my family to a picnic lunch for a birthday celebration but because of my busy schedule, I asked to change it to an early morning breakfast at a local early opening cafe. There my friends spoke about them getting together weekly for painting sessions.

After our neat breakfast, I spoke about how it would be neat to meet monthly (due to my busy schedule) and to have an art project that we work on to share at the next monthly breakfast. They thought it would be a good idea as I'm currently working on the small canvas to send to Waiheke Island which then gets forwarded to Italy.

We're now set to meet monthly with our next meeting due late next month. Our homework for this month is to colour a Chinese dragon/or lion (as I interpret it as being) by Johanna Basford (my favourite grown up colouring book artist) and to bring it along to our monthly meeting and to talk about it.

We now have a group of 4 as my artistic younger sister has now joined it and it's pretty neat to see women now doing something that often we don't get time to do. In fact, when I was in my 20s+ I thought that I would have to wait until I retired before I would start painting because I was so busy with my education career and then my family needing my support and attention.

It now feels like the time is right to begin to enjoy the things that I didn't put as a priority. Other art projects may include painting, scrapbooking page, origami, mixed media etc.

And in closing my daughter asked me about how quiet my book projects have been lately (am looking at launching the first book in early April) and suggested for me to consider drawing up a Pasifika patterns colouring book similar to many of the paintings that I've been painting over the years but haven't promoted. I think I'll take her up on her suggestion and watch this space...