I hope this doesn't break any rules, I shared it on r/pics the other day and a lot of people said I should share it here as well.

I started painting in July 2017 when I was 28. Prior to that I had tried to get into it on a few occasions, but always gave up after a few weeks because I just had no clue what I was doing and would get frustrated at my not being a master artist from the get go.

The big things that got me to finally stick with it was realizing that being bad at it was likely something every artist I looked up to had to deal with at one point or another. The only difference was they had already gone through that part of the process and had years of practice behind them.

That and that quote "in a year from now you may wish you had started today" came to mind one day, so I decided to just go for it. Sure enough, I had to deal with a lot of failure and frustration, seeing art I loved and being unable to even come close to it was annoying, but little by little I started to get better and better and eventually got to the point where I could paint better than I ever thought I could.

I still have a lot more to learn and a long road ahead of me, but I'm glad I decided to give it a shot even though I absolutely sucked at it.

Oh, for full context, the top painting was done in April 2019, about 2 years after I started painting, the bottom one was done a week and a half ago, so about 1.5 years after the first.