There is a moment in teaching that means more to me than a finished painting.

It is when someone decides to keep going.

During Flora in Focus, one of my participants was struggling with her painting. By Sunday, she was ready to pack up and leave.

I suggested she take a break. Go for a walk. Come back when she was ready.

When she returned, we worked on the painting together. We looked at what was already there, made a few changes and slowly found our way through the difficult parts.

By the end of the day, she had a beautiful painting to take home.

So when she came back to join me for Radiant Harvest, I was genuinely touched.

She could have decided that painting wasn’t for her.

Instead, she came back.

This time, we painted pears.

And somewhere during the day, something shifted. We worked together briefly on blending and shading, and afterwards she messaged me that she finally felt she understood it. Her confidence had grown, and she was already looking forward to painting more.

That was the highest compliment I could receive as an educator.

Because I don’t think teaching is really about showing someone how to make a painting look like mine.

It’s about helping them find their way into their own painting.

Sometimes that means demonstrating something. Sometimes it means sitting beside someone and looking at the problem together. And sometimes it means saying, put the brush down for a while and come back later.

Painting can be vulnerable. We can become so close to our own work that we can’t see what is actually there anymore.

A little distance can change everything.

And perhaps that’s one of the things I love most about painting: there is nearly always another way forward.

Acrylic paint is forgiving. If you don’t like the result, you can paint over it and simply try again.

Sometimes, that’s all it takes for something to finally make sense.

And sometimes, the most beautiful thing you take home from a workshop isn’t the painting.

It’s the confidence to pick up the brush again.