In 2023, Charlotte Shreeve got back into drawing and unwittingly discovered a tool that calmed her ADHD.

She’s now working towards an exhibit of the graphite and charcoal portraits that have kept her busy this year.

Having a clearer head is a bonus. Although she has not had a doctor confirm that she suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, her self-diagnosis did not come as a surprise to people who knew her.

“When you meet me it's fairly clear that I have ADHD and when I told my friends that I think I have ADHD, I think they all laughed in unison; they’d figured it out a long time ago,” she said.

“I'm all over the place, I can't stay still. I struggle to concentrate on things unless they interest me. I have periods of hyper focus and then periods where I doom scroll on my phone …. all the usual symptoms.”

As medication wasn’t appealing she decided to manage the disorder as best she could.

“Which is where the artwork came in,” she said. “I’d been thinking for ages that I wanted to get back into art. I used to draw at school [but] I guess ADHD and procrastination [kept me from doing it].”

At the beginning of the year, a friend sent a drawing to a WhatsApp chat. It was the inspiration she needed.

Ms Shreeve was on holiday with her family at the time. She went out and bought pencils and a pad and got to work.

“I was like, ‘I can do that.’ I drew some pictures and I think from that point on it's just been something that I've been consistently trying to stay on top of – which is hard when you have two kids and a full-time job. But it’s the one thing that can actually get me to sit down for hours without moving.

“It just clears my brain. When I'm drawing I'm so focused on what I'm doing I kind of forget anything else that's going on.”

Ms Shreeve, an accountant, is happy to have found a creative outlet. Drawing also offers a chance to “chill out” once her young children have gone to bed.

“It’s also a nice yin and yang to my normal life, to go home and do something a bit creative,” she said. “I like drawing faces. I like the detail and the shading and just the texture, the skin … It takes a long time to do that. You have to do multiple layers and use a rubber and different pencils. It does take time but I just really enjoy doing them.”

Aside from art classes she took in school Ms Shreeve hasn’t had any instruction. She usually works from photographs of friends.

She believes her drawing is helped because she “sees faces differently” than most people.

“For me, all I see is texture. I almost kind of forget that I'm drawing a person’s face,” she said.

“I have signed up for [life drawing] classes next year at the [Bermuda Society of Arts] which I'm hoping will improve my drawing technique and it will allow me to create a picture in a shorter time frame. So it might speed up my process but I generally work from photos.

“I'm really proud of them. They’re getting better as well, which is quite a rewarding thing. I'm just getting a bit more familiar with the tools I'm using and the paper and even the different media. And so they're getting a bit quicker to do. I'm really excited to see what they'll look like this time next year.”

Early this month she shared her personal journey in a Pecha Kucha talk called 2023: The Year I Got Back into Drawing.

In it, Ms Shreeve explored “the transformative nature of art and self-expression”.

“I talked about how I approach portraits and it's all about drawing gridlines on the page and I focus on a grid at a time.

“Over the course of the year I've just found different ways of doing texture and progressively, as I've gone along, they’ve just become more and more realistic. ”

As far as a public show of her work Ms Shreeve has reached out to the Bermuda Society of Arts and has discussed the possibility with Risa Hunter, the director of Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art. If everything falls into place her hope is to have created enough work to justify an exhibit at the end of 2024.

“I’ve been talking to her about what the process is to do an exhibition and one of the things I want to do over the next couple of weeks is to think through what a theme would be if I was to do it,” she said.