Travel back in time to when they still did O’Grades at school—me, a 16-year-old doing art because the alternative was home economics and modern-thinking gals in the 80s wanted nothing to do with cooking and home-making.

[Misguided—I could have learned how to sew. A very useful skill. Drawing? Not so—unless you play a lot of Pictionary.]

Anyway, fast forward to 2018. Me. Not arty. (Grade C in that art exam.) Hopelessly rubbish at taking pictures. Terrible at designing websites. Beyond bloody awful at anything that requires an eye for design.

Then, I discover Canva. At first, I’m slow. It takes me three million years to figure out how to do the transparency thing. It’s a big day when I work out that double clicking in a box allows you to change text. When I discover grid lines, I’m over the moon.

I’m still not 100 percent sure what the pay thing means. Download for one use? What is one use? You put it on WordPress, or you do it on Wattpad? Then what? As a freelancer myself, I don’t want to ‘do’ any photographer or graphic designer out of their rightful pay or royalties. The online world doesn’t work in content providers favour, so we should stick together in solidarity.

But yeah, Canva. I make my own book covers. I tinker with infographics, and I try to create memes and gifs. The rubbish 16-year-old art student stirs. Gosh, she ponders to herself, if I took the time to learn this stuff, I might be amazing.

In the meantime, you get my steps on the way to learning*. I’ve pasted above the latest book cover I created on Canva. And you can read the book here.

Art. Never give up on it. If you want to explore Canva for yourself, the website is here.

*Not sure the transparency thing works here.