The pandemic has affected my family and my routines in many ways. Some are good, like how we have been able to have many more family meals because we are all home more often. But, others are not as beneficial, like how much less motivated I’ve been to complete simple tasks. I’ve definitely experienced negative emotions during lockdown, mostly due to missing my friends, family, and essentially how life was before. Art helps to combat these feelings by taking my mind off of the situation and focusing on something that I find more fun. Art is definitely a way I’ve coped with the lockdown, especially in the form of music. Listening to music, writing music, dancing to music, it just helps to calm me down and make me happier. Painting is another form of art that has helped me. I’ve painted shoes and water bottles for other people, and creating things that help bring happiness to others also brings happiness to me. Seeing someone else smile because of my art helps me to stop focusing as much on all of these scary world events.

Makeup is my creative outlet. It's a way to show the world who you are and what you’re feeling without saying a single word. I have been doing makeup for a little less than three years and still love the feeling I get when I do it. I was inspired by many drag queens to do makeup because they showed everyone their own sense of style, past, and future goals all through their makeup and fashion.Transitioning to a life with a pandemic was a very difficult experience for me. I suffer from both depression and anxiety so it was very difficult to endure a lot of change at once and not be able to see my friends and family. Doing makeup was able to keep me calm and give me peace when things got harder and being quarantined gave me more time to do my art. I did my makeup every other day at least because it was my calm in the storm that is corona. Having time to myself in quarantine also grew my confidence in my artistry and taught me that I should be proud of my work.

I’m a computer programmer and a self-taught watercolorist. I’m from Iran. And when pandemic started, we were working remotely and locked down at home for a while. It was at first funny to work from home but soon my daily timing had changed. I was awake at mid night and used to work more and more on my phone and laptop. I usually fell slept on my desk, which was why I painted myself in the first painting as sleeping on my laptop. I tried to show how I could see the light of day from the windows of Microsoft Windows desktop background. In the second painting I was home for about 2 months, and I had started to eat junk foods and became fat and still sticking to my laptop. And in this painting a little virus was free out there and looking at me with funny face. I was locked down while it was free.
Finally, the quarantine ended, they told we should work at office. Going out is good but weird. Wearing mask at work, avoiding your own colleagues. Many were and still are dying. We were told that kids wouldn’t catch the virus (we found later it wasn’t true) So I painted the third painting. I called it "next generation". To all orphans who have lost their parents but they were survivors. But maybe wearing a mask has become a new habit for next generation
The fourth painting is actually my first painting I made about Corona. I painted it when virus was in Wuhan. There was a doctor leaving his wife who going to a hospital in Wuhan on the news at that time.
The last painting was about Capitan Tom More, the British old Capitan who tried to walk and gather money to help people suffering from Virus. He is 100 years old. Surely it is hard for him to walk. So, I painted a cross on his shoulder. He is carrying the pain & suffering to make a better world (like what Jesus did)

My name is Sozyar Ahmed, I am from Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. Painting and drawing have always been my hobby and talent that I am developing every day to become better and better at them. This pandemic hasn’t effected my family in a major way but it gave me a lot of time to spend with them and communicate with them more. But for me it actually effected my mental health, because usually I kept myself busy with university’s work and studies, but now that I have to be home and I have nothing to distract me, my mental issues are starting to come out again specially my anxiety.
On the first months my anxiety was at its peak when I couldn’t even think straight and most of the times I couldn’t eat nor sleep peacefully but painting kept me calm and saint, the moment I put my brush on the canvas my mind goes off of my anxiety thoughts, so it gives my brain a break from all of my thoughts and prevents my body from having anxiety attacks. And you can see that in the sketches I have done (you can see them on my Instagram) they are mostly my anxiety thoughts that I transformed into drawings.
I guess I can say the way the virus affected my work was in a positive way, because I have to stay home more often and that way I have more time to paint and practice new tricks or styles of painting, so this way I don’t feel lonely so often, although I was never a social person myself, but the more I paint the more I can cope with the isolation, it’s like the canvas becomes someone I can speak to with my brush, and that way I feel less lonely.