Spending so much time stuck indoors over the past year has given people the opportunity to develop new skills and hobbies for which they previously had not had the time. Maytal Kessler, a senior at Ma’ayanot, has used her abundance of free time to launch her own business, Maytal’s Creations. What started as a smaller project, putting people’s names onto basketballs, has grown into a design business, painting any design on any object.
Maytal creates her personalized designs with a variety of art materials: Sharpie paint markers; regular and acrylic paint and even glow-in-the-dark paint, depending on the object and the design of each order. She hopes to soon get a heat press, something which will make placing designs onto hard-to-paint-on objects, like water bottles and mugs, much simpler. Although she took some art lessons as a child, and is in an art class in Ma’ayanot now, Maytal said that her artistic talent comes from a natural affinity and the fact that she is from an artistic family. Both Maytal’s mother and grandmother are also very artistic and are there to offer advice on her projects.
Maytal’s Creations grew not just from Maytal’s artistic nature, but also from her inclination towards chesed. In her free time, Maytal volunteers as an EMT for Bergenfield Volunteer Ambulance Corps, and she wanted to take helping others to another level. To that end, Maytal has made Maytal’s Creations a charitable venture, with half of the proceeds donated to a “charity of the month.” So far these have included organizations dedicated to causes such as children’s cancer research, animal shelters and clothing and food for needy kids, and Maytal is open to suggestions for future charities to receive donations. Not only are half the proceeds from individual orders donated, but Maytal’s Creations also donates half the proceeds from designs for bar/bat mitzvah events, for which the family determines the recipient.
Even though Maytal does not intend to pursue art as a career, since she plans to go into the medical field, she says she is very glad she is doing this now and called this business “the best experience ever.”
To learn more about Maytal’s Creations and to order, visit Maytal’s Creation! on Facebook and maytals_creations on Instagram.
