We started from the heart
Our Story
Curious how Get Messy began?
(Imagine a thick South African accent as you read this, okay?)
I founded Get Messy in 2014 after actively rebelling against a life of passivity.
You see, I’ve always lived an easy – and good – life. (Read more about it here – it’s a worthwhile detour, I promise.)
And for a long time, life was good enough.
Except … it really wasn’t.
Because easy and good doesn’t always equal fulfilling.
And so, slowly but surely, I grew into an intense depression. It wasn’t an overnight emergence. It was a secret seedling that gradually germinated, sprouted and propagated in my mind, until it completely blocked out the sun for over a year.
But even in the darkness, there is light.
For me, that light was the love of my family, friends and husband who had been steadily hacking away at the weeds and clearing a path for me to find my way home.
Can we have a moment of gratitude for the incredible humans that see us when we can’t see ourselves?
And through a series of very fortunate events and gradual/small, repeated hard work, I (re)discovered my creativity and realised that I really, really wanted to be an artist.
The biggest challenge? I wasn’t creating art.
Forehead slap.
I’d sit down to create and stop, stumped by the “what” and the “how” of making art. I’d focus on my vision of the perfect result and lose the love of the process.
My art journaling adventure began as a way for me to get messy, ditch perfectionism, stay accountable and consistently create art.
But, magically, it transformed into something so much more than that too.
After just a week of being accountable to my art journaling journey via blogging, Get Messy had grown to three. Together, we were sharing our triumphs and struggles, learning from each other and creating. So. By the end of the year, we had a tribe of almost 50 artists, and I was hosting blog hops complete with art journal prompts to inspire our family. There were so many people on the waitlist that it was like fate had sashayed onto my path and painted a great, big, “Do this, dummy” sign there.
So, I did.
Today, I’m honoured to lead a tribe of incredible humans passionate about cultivating their art practice.
If you’ve ever played an online role-playing game, you’ll know all about support characters.
Their sole purpose in the game is to make sure the main characters – the heroes – are, erm, well supported.
The heroes rock the game, smash the enemy and unleash their best selves to win the game, save the world and collect the booty.
(… Treasure, not butts 🍑.)
While the support heroes are the trusty sidekicks, quietly healing the hero’s wounds and clearing out the pesky gremlins standing in the hero’s way.
In this adventure, you’re the hero.
And I’m your support sidekick. Your Yoda. Your arty BFF. And your fairy freaking artmother.
I’ll do all the work and figure out all the tech (after eight years, I know what I’m doing) and clear the path to make sure that getting arty and getting messy is easy for you.
I will support character you all the way to the end of the quest.
So, whaddya say … Ready to begin your arty adventure?