About

I’m Monique, and I live in a busy village in the South-East of England with my husband, two teenage sons and four cats.

For as long as I can remember I've always been creating and making. My earliest memories are of colouring 1970's geometric pattern books and building 3D geometric models from paper!

I had been looking forward to our holiday for months. I decided that with everything that had been going on, I was going to set myself a challenge and create something every day we were away. This didn't seem like a big challenge as we were only away for 2 weeks and my heart had been aching to do something creative for ages, so I thought it would be easy! (Oh, how wrong I was!)

I spent the weeks leading up to our holiday getting my art supplies together, choosing a new sketchbook and dreaming about how wonderful it would be to have time to spend creating. I bought some new markers and found a special tote bag to put everything in. I chose my materials carefully so that I wouldn't get overwhelmed with having too many materials, but I would have just enough. I even invested in some special watercolour paints in a book format so that I wouldn't be carrying around a paint set. I was all set!

Needless to say, my creative endeavours whilst on holiday didn't go quite as planned! I managed to create something every day, but I struggled SO much! Firstly, it was much harder than I thought it would be to decide WHAT I wanted to create, and then to actually create something that didn't look like a 5-year-old had spilled paint all over the paper, or just scribbled with felt-tip pens! What I thought I loved creating I discovered I didn't love creating. The art processes that I thought would bring me the greatest joy seemed to produce the most angst in me. But the most important thing that I discovered was that the artist I thought I was in my head was a very different kind of artist when I put pen and paintbrush to paper. Some of the things I thought I would enjoy creating the most and that would be the most successful were some of the pieces that I was most disappointed with! And other things that I thought wouldn't work, or that I thought I couldn't pull-off became my favourite pieces. It was an eye-opening time!

But I learnt so much from every day of my holiday experience. Some of the things I created, namely the geometric circular patterns (which were often drawn sitting on the windy beach) were some of the pieces I loved the most. The simple satisfaction of repeatedly drawing shapes and seeing a pattern emerge became so exciting to me! I also loved colouring the patterns in after I had drawn them and seeing how the look of the pattern changed by adding colour.

I decided that I would love to have some patterns that were readymade and that I could include in my art as sometimes I don't have a lot of time to create and having them already there would be a game-changer for me. I set about designing some patterns and experimenting with including them in my art pieces. I soon realised that I enjoy creating them as much as I enjoy colouring them!

My biggest stress with creating regularly has been trying to decide WHAT to create, but when I know that I can just grab a pattern from my stack, find an interesting background, choose a hand-drawn pattern and put it all together, it makes creating into a really exciting experience.

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