Dear readers,

My name is Ameera. I’m a 15 year old girl from Texas, currently heading into my sophomore year of high school. And I LOVE art, both through colors and with paintbush, and through words with pen. Hence, PaintsandPens was born!

Welcome to my blog! I’m excited to share a little bit more about myself through this blog. You can expect personal stories, my perspectives, rants, vents, and my findings as I navigate my life. For the first entry, I thought I would share more about why I started this website:

When we are young, it’s so simple to create. Whether it be a scribble of a sun and a rainbow or a fantastical poem or story about dragons and princesses, we all had our own way of expressing our childhood imagination into something tangible. I’ve always wondered why taking time out of your day to create is almost always sacrificed as we age. As a creatively oriented person, the time I spend creating serves as an anchor to my life: It allows me to refocus (especially needed as an emotional, hormonal teen girl) and provides me with a sense of balance.  If I’m being honest, allowing yourself time to just be, to toy around with your thoughts and feelings, can have a profound impact on how you view the world, and even how you view yourself as well. In fact, I feel like I’m just now starting to see the world through an artistic lens, and suddenly, I find myself being able to draw inspiration from anything at any time. It’s like my life became that much more amazing when I took the time to hone in my creative abilities.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not always easy to create. If you’re anything like me and are a perfectionist to a fault, maybe the weight of your own expectations stops you from practicing your craft. There’s this pressure that whatever you have to be working on has to be “good.” “A masterpiece.” Especially when on most social media platforms, it’s so easy to lose value in your own work when seeing the capability of others. And then you just end up making nothing at all. Or maybe in your case, you suffer from art blocks often, or you just lack motivation. That’s where PaintandPens comes in. I want this site to serve as a judgment-free, interactive place for my fellow creatives who want to rekindle their spark for self-expression, and/or creatives who just want to keep their momentum going. It’s a place where we share our achievements, as well as our mistakes, inspire each other and overall grow together as one big creative community. I know when I first decided to pursue my hobbies more seriously, I could’ve used a place like this, and I’m so beyond thrilled to be bringing this to you.

So, to all of the young storytellers, the passionate doodlers, aspiring journalists, talented painters, fearless sculptors,  photographs, and other creatives who have decided to visit my site: Hope you can stick around and be part of the fam!

Lots of Love,

Ameera

P.S. Question of the week: What are some of your hobbies?