Stuff in My Bathroom

In an email to a friend today I said the following: “I started my first watercolours class of the session today and was green with envy when our teacher showed us the work of a 30-somethin’ art director gal who also publishes books of her fine arts projects. If only I’d actually work at my art, I could do stuff like that too. But fear of… well fear of everything is keeping me from expressing myself properly.”

So yes, today was our first watercolours class of the session. Our teacher always has us do an ice-breaker exercise in the first class to get us to re-familiarize ourselves with our paints and brushes and so on because she rightly assumes that not all of us have been working at our art throughout the summer months. The inspiration for this exercise was from work by Leanne Shapton who is a 30-something overachiever accomplished  illustrator, art director, author and publisher . Her latest book project was Native Trees of Canada which was inspired by an old edition of the government reference book, The Native Trees of Canada, originally published in 1917. She  does all kinds of interesting projects, and our teacher showed us one of them as the inspiration for our exercise today, which was to draw a series of objects from our bathrooms and paint them as silhouettes with different colour combinations.