I’ve never claimed to be an artistic person, or have much innate talent when it comes to anything under that banner. However, in the last few years, I’ve come to really enjoy making things just for fun. Coincidentally, it all started partly due to my work as a TTUC, where I discovered directed drawing videos to do with the kids.

A dragon ice cream cone directed draw I did at work one day. Design credit goes to Art for Kids Hub YouTube channel.

I quickly found these activities one of my favourite things to do with a class and started making any excuse I could to be able to do them. They were always handy for planning art blocks, required little preparation, and were quick to set up if previously planned activities fell through. Soon enough, I found myself even doing them on my own time at home!

I had also begun to take up painting around the same time, albeit not on a flat surface like paper or a canvas. My husband is into Warhammer 40 000, a tabletop RPG with small models that represent each player’s active army. It falls to players to build the models themselves out of individual pieces and then paint them. When my husband expressed that he greatly preferred building models over painting them, I saw an opportunity for me to simultaneously indulge a potential new hobby and share in something with him. I offered to learn how to paint the models for him, to which he happily agreed.

Soon enough, I had a squad of Necrons (aka cyber-skeletons and skelling-spiders) of my very own to paint. Note that these are only about halfway done, but I’m quite proud of them nonetheless. Alternatively, I tried using the same paints to decorate some blank baubles at a friend’s house one Christmas.

A Christmas bauble modeled on Nintendo character Kirby. I had done a Dragon Ball and Pokeball as well, but those pictures unfortunately came out too blurry.

Another activity that might fall under this umbrella would be diamond dot kits, first introduced to me by my mother. Similar to colour-by-number, I place colored plastic “diamonds” onto a sticky canvas coded to varying types. A single one of these projects takes a very long time to complete, but its simplistic process I’ve always found very meditative and would recommend it to anyone who might be interested. I’ve also considered using leftover dots to make pixel art with, but that particular project has yet to materialize.

A Pikachu & Eevee diamond art kit I did. These can be found either at various hobby stores, craft fairs, and online.

Most recently, however, I picked up the art of crochet – I’ve always loved cute plushies and saw this as an opportunity to learn how to make my own. On top of that, I felt that learning a new skill from scratch on my own would aid me in becoming a better teacher. I would have to examine my own learning style, have a lot of patience with myself, and curb my tendencies toward perfectionism. I thought that by doing so, I can re-assume the perspective of a learner and the learning process as a whole. That way, I can better see things from my students’ viewpoints when they are first internalizing new concepts. I ended up making this a project for my First Peoples Principles of Learning project – check it out here!

Fred the Dinosaur, a Woobles kit that was my first-ever crochet project. Note that these kits are fun, but prohibitively expensive and leave out certain vital techniques to learning crochet.

Overall, creative interests are beginning to hold more and more importance to me, not just for the sake of spending time on hobbies, but also assessing my learning style. I hope to add more here as time goes on!