My Very First Oil Painting

I've been looking through my old artwork and I stumbled across this treasure.  I think I might have been a freshman in high school when I decided to dabble with paints.  I grabbed the paints from a cheap paint by numbers kit and got to work.

 I think my inspiration came from a photograph in one of my textbooks.  I was insanely proud of this painting.  I kept bragging to my parents how well I executed the shadowing on the hot air balloon.  They seemed or at least pretended to be impressed.  I was therefore encouraged to continue painting as a hobby. I listened to audio books such as Life of Pi, Memoirs of a Geisha, and The Great Gatsby as I sat in the corner painting pictures of tigers, snow covered mountains, and the Statue of Liberty.

To this day I love to paint.  It's fun to be able to trace it all back to this simple hot air balloon painting.  Can you remember the first thing you ever painted?