we're always going to have like you say that gap and what you learn is that the fun is honest, generous and humorous conversations that will

feed your creative soul and get you thinking with me Alice Sheridan and

me Louise Fletcher and today we're going to dive into a topic prompted by a lovely new listener email that I got Eric in sunny Florida building

your boats hello it was lovely to hear from you. I won't read out word for word, but basically Eric saying he is new to making art, he's absolutely loving it. He's all in and working on it every day, but full of so many questions.

All about how to find what direction to go in.

He mentions possibly taking classes close to home,

but enjoys just kind of listening along

while he's working and wondered if we had any advice

or wanted to have a conversation about it.

Now Eric mentioned that he was copying things as a way of practicing.

Yeah, he said, I'm copying things from the website or books that I really want to create my own.

Because I come across that a lot with beginner students where that is, that does seem to be a common way in that we either copy other people's

artwork or we copy photographs so maybe we do famous people portraits or we do

landscapes we've seen we've got a photograph of.

And I remember going to this watercolor class when I was trying in America and I

was trying to get back into art and I went to this class for watercolors and we went in and the lady was teaching the class said take a photograph out of the box at the front and then we're going to paint whichever photograph you choose.

And there were all things like some boats in a harbour and really like they would have ended up being very just

twi and I had paid for the class and I rang Philip and said I really just want to come home

I don't want to do this it's just awful because for me I could never find my way into that idea of copying. However, if she had said to us,

he is a Rembrandt portrait, try copying that, that would have been exciting and interesting and I would have learned

something.

And very hard, yes.

...