I started painting from a really young age. I was just one and a half years old when I first held a brush in my hands and sat down next to my mum to paint in her small art studio. My mum would give me newspapers and teach me how to paint shapes and forms by using the shapes of the newspaper images and advertisements as guides.

Throughout my childhood I kept drawing every week. I would mostly draw cartoons from my favourite tv shows, but I also liked to draw my family and landscapes, as long as there was a house in it.

At the age of 11 I started taking art lessons every Saturday for two hours. I used to look forward to those two hours every single day of the week. I felt that I was able to be myself for those two hours, just focusing on what I liked to do the most. I owned Andrea (my teacher), a lot of what I know today. She taught me how to draw with graphite, paint and layer pencils, something that I hadn’t truly explored until that moment. But, it’s true that, while I loved those lessons, by the age of 14 I was the only one my age there, as all the other students were under 9 years old. So, when I turned 15 my mum and I decided that it would be better for me to switch my art lessons with tennis, a sport that I was already planning. To tell you the truth… I only did tennis for another year after I stopped taking art lessons.