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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Looking into a mirror is something most of us do every day without a second thought, but one artist is turning the reflective surface into a creative drawing board.
Helene Meldahl, 26, has been doodling on mirrors and inserting herself into imaginative scenes to post on her Instagram account, Mirrorsme, for almost a year. Her work recently went viral, drawing thousands of new followers to her account.
“Some people write in a diary, and some people play tennis,” she told The Huffington Post. “I draw on mirrors.”
Meldahl describes herself as a born doodler. Originally from Norway, she lives in Washington, D.C., where she is an intern at the Norwegian Embassy.
She started drawing on mirrors with her red lipstick to leave fun messages for her roommate in college. Meldahl wanted to take a break from her homework one day when the inspiration for a unique mirror selfie struck.
“I was going out for a jog, but it started raining so heavily outside, and the thunderstorms were so bad, so I just took my lipstick, drew a huge umbrella with thunder and lightning around it and pretended like I held it in the mirror,” she told Ellen’s Good News.
Creating the doodle was so much fun that Meldahl decided to continue her work. The drawings take about 30 minutes to create and are made of chalk markers, posca markers and acrylic markers, she wrote in a post on Bored Panda.
“I bought my last markers in New York, and the salesperson just couldn’t understand why I needed all those acrylic markers to draw on mirrors,” she wrote. “Later that night, I drew Brooklyn Bridge on my hotel room mirror in Midtown (it was a nice hotel too, with a huuuge mirror… but I decided to remove the mirror art before I left).”
Selfies can provide a creative outlet, she said.
“We all want recognition for who we are, everyone wants to be seen, that’s only human,” she told Ellen’s Good News. “The selfie gives us a unique chance of documenting our lives and what we do, and who we meet. We get to tell the story we want.”
