Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott works as a motion graphics designer, so creativity has always been part of her life, but all of it happens on a computer. She found herself missing the tangible side of art, the kind she hadn't touched since school, and wanted to get back to where her love of it began. So she went back to class. She started with three years of regular lessons before branching out to other classes to keep painting going.
She calls herself a budding artist, with refreshing honesty about how much there still is to learn. Oils were entirely new to her, and she's quick to point out that knowing colour theory and actually mixing paint are two very different games. She's still finding her style, but she loves painting from life, a still life indoors or a scene outdoors.
She finds the creative process genuinely hard, torture at times, she says, but it always comes good in the end, and if one painting doesn't work, the next one will. She takes inspiration from the sheer number of brilliant painters she comes across, on television and across her social media feeds, famous or not. The biggest surprise of going back to class, though, wasn't the painting. It was discovering she could do it at all, and making real friends she still talks to outside the class.