I have a lot to say about the colour pink.
It's my favorite donut icing, but was my least a favorite color as a child.
It is a color often associated with romance and femininity, and yet it has
also been used as a tranquilizing color in prison.
Flowers, cotton candy, Valentine's Day, but not rainbows.
And pink is a symbol for breast cancer awareness.
It has become a symbol of the strength of breast cancer survivors and fighters.
So today, as I hunt through my many
colored pencils and markers to gather all of my pink supplies, I want to dedicate
this art to anyone who has ever been impacted by breast cancer.
And I want to dedicate this video to my
mum, who lost her own battle with breast cancer four years ago this week.
Her favorite color was pink.
Because this is a special project, today,
I wanted to create my own coloring page that represented the journey that so many
cancer fighters like my mum have been through.
Mum's first cancer diagnosis came in 2005, while I was still in school.
The news shook our whole family and the
roller coaster of treatment, appointments and uncertainty began.
I remember one of the biggest challenges for mom was losing her hair.
It felt like she was losing part of her identity.
The wigs were itchy and uncomfortable, and
it was the first time as a child that I ever noticed her lacking confidence.
But Mum was always beautiful and her joy and hope was contagious.
So this page is my tribute to her strength and her joy, even without her hair.
And there's more to this story in a moment.
This now is the part of these color challenge videos where my huge collection
comes back to haunt me and I find myself overthinking to a dangerous level.
But it's also fun because I have 187
pencils, 91 markers and six gel pens here and I need to sort them out.
The last time I did this for my purple
challenge, it took me a whole day just to sort and to swatch all the supplies.
And I have more pinks now than I had purples then.
In the end of that project, I used about
half of my purple supplies in the final art piece.
But today I want to set myself the challenge to use every pink supply, so
sorting and swatching is the only place to start.
As I'm doing this, I'm finding it really hard to actually find nice pinks.
There are so many fluoros and super bright pinks.
This is going to make this art more challenging than I'd hoped.
But it also gets me thinking, what color exactly is pink?
Because there are a lot of different interpretations of pink, and if this is a
one color challenge - we need to define our color a little more specifically.
So I have been eliminating pinks and basing my selections on more of a magenta
kind of range of pinks here, which is really sort of aiming between a red and a
violet - but maybe my definition of pink is wrong.
Maybe this has kind of ended up being more
of a magenta challenge or a rose challenge.
So I made a chart, a chart of acceptable pinkness and I want to keep my range small
so I'm eliminating all the pale reds and oranges and sticking to this magenta style
pink with that sort of halfway between red and purple.
So if it's not in the chart, it's not in
the challenge and this has taken me a whole day.
Wait - I don't actually have any darker pinks.
What even is a dark pink?
So by my chart, a dark pink is basically a burgundy.
So I've brought back some of my burgundy supplies to give our picture some contrast
and I think I am finally ready to start coloring - tomorrow.
So I finally made a start on the face and
this is immediately harder than I expected.
I know in my mind that getting the values right is the key to making this work.
By that I mean making sure that I get the shadows and the lighting right.
If I can put the shadows in the right place and keep the right areas dark and
light, the actual colors I use should matter less.
But I'm still finding myself second
guessing every single stroke and I don't know how I'll ever get through every
pencil and mark it in my stash here if I keep going at this pace.
But I just have to trust the process and at least I have made a start.
Although pink was one of my least favorite
colors growing up, I am glad that you all chose this in my community poll for which
color to choose next, because I am filming this in October which is Breast Cancer
Awareness Month and I've been wanting to do a video on this topic for a while.
The timing was perfect.
Back in 2016, after I'd had my first son
and started making coloring books, my mom's cancer returned again.
I don't know if it hurt more this time
because I was a mum now too or if the reality of the whole thing was finally
starting to sink in, but I found myself wanting to spend more time with her and do
whatever I could to support her through her journey.
I created the book, Coloring through
Cancer, with many of the quotes that mum helped me develop.
Even as her cancer progressed through to stage four, she never stopped sharing her
joy and strength of people around her and she was so proud of what I had created.
But the book wasn't just for mum.
I gave the digital version to many cancer
centers and hospitals for free and I made donations when I could to the
organisations who were working to find a cure for people like mum.
And over the past year I've been thinking about this book and I've wanted to extend
that offer beyond the hospitals, making it available to everyone.
So I will be making the Coloring Through Cancer Book completely free as a printable
on my website from now on, so anyone who needs it can find it.
Mom's cancer came back again and again and again in the following years.
It attacked in different ways and we didn't know what to expect.
Shane and I moved in with my parents for a year while we were building a new house,
along with Zach, who was just three years old at the time.
And during that time, Mum spent more time at the hospital than at home.
Zack and I would take the hour drive to visit her every second day, not knowing if
she would ever return home permanently or if this was just the new normal.
It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to face in my life.
Learning to process that grief of the
future while living in the uncertainty of what would actually happen next; trying to
control every moment and every emotion and not knowing how to process any of it.
It felt like a big mess.
I knew that it would all make sense in the
end, that one day I would look back and know how to process everything.
But in the moment, all I could do was take one day at a time, one moment at a time,
one phone call from the hospital at a time.
And in 2018, I fell pregnant with my second child, Oliver.
And before we could say hello to Oliver, we said goodbye to Mom.
So I've approached this page in a way that I have never tried before.
At first, I was trying to control every
single color, but I realized that I just couldn't manage that.
Instead, I wanted to find beauty in the chaos.
So I decided not to worry about the colors
and the hues and to just separate the dark from the light.
From here, all I've been doing is creating a clear distinction between the dark and
the light and allowing everything else to be a chaotic mess of colors in between.
And somehow,
through all the chaos, I think I'm finding something beautiful that I would never
have found if I tried to control every single color.
We had some pretty dark moments in our
last week with Mum, but we had some incredibly special highlights as well.
She made jokes with the nurses and had the whole room laughing.
She was surrounded by her whole family,
who sang her favorite songs with her while she rested.
And when I looked back on all of that chaos, the anxiety, the hospital visits,
the dark and the light moments, what I remembered the most is Mum's smile.
Just like the highlights make an art piece, it was her smile and her joy that
became the highlights of who she was, not her battle with cancer.
I have used everything marker and pencil in this challenge today, even the neons.
Letting go of the control and taking a
risk with the colors has allowed me to create something that I probably would
never have created if I was aiming for perfection.
And in fact, I think this is probably one
of my favorite pieces that I have ever created.
I have made the Coloring Through Cancer PDF completely free now on my website.
And the goal of this book was always to
get into as many hands as possible and to help as many people as possible.
And I have loved the stories that I've already heard from people who have been
encouraged or who have found coloring helpful in some of their darkest days.
So if you know someone who is going through this journey, please feel free to
share it and print a copy for them as well.
I've also decided to donate all of the past profits from the sale of the
printable book to help further cancer research here in Australia as well.
So that's something that Shane and I will
be doing as a part of breast cancer awareness month.
This has been a difficult journey for my family, but I know my mom would be smiling
to think that even one other person could find hope and joy in her story.
She always lived to bring joy to others.
She was a generous and selfless person,
and that's the mum that I will always remember.
This coloring page is now also available
for free as a part of the coloring book on my email list.
So if you'd like a copy, I'll link below.
And I'd love to see what you can do with this page too.