You may recall I mentioned I was participating in Vivienne McMaster’s Be Your Own Beloved online self portrait photography class throughout February.

A combination of a recently thoroughly broken heart, a growing realization of the real need to start caring for and getting to know myself better, and a desire to have something positive and creative to focus on led me to sign up.

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These are my photos from the first week. Viv sends us an email every day with a theme to explore through our lens, whether that’s a phone or a hardcore DSLR or anything in between.

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All the themes are centred around, of course, the concept of self care and self love. I know from taking Wading In a couple of years back how healing and also how fun self portraiture can be.

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It also helps to have programmes like PicMonkey and PixlrExpress available to make your photos all super enhanced. 🙂

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So far it’s been fun and also challenging. Sometimes it can be quite vulnerable-making, but the support and encouragement within the Flickr group is so heart warming.

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Not to mention inspiring; there are so many wonderful and imaginative interpretations of the prompts, it’s a real joy to visit when I upload my own photos.

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I know it’s not painting ~ that is happening too but is all in progress at the moment ~ but I like to keep a record of all my creative doings. 🙂 I’m also working on getting my book published by my birthday {21st}, so most of my energy is going in that direction at the moment.  Exciting and frustrating in equal measure. And wait til you see the cover! {more on that to come}

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