Walking into the dining room, the tables are covered with blank canvases set in front of chairs like giant place cards waiting for the intended guest’s name to be graciously placed upon them. A palette of paint for each setting is served with puddles of red, green, yellow, blue, black, and white acrylic paints 
ready to be dipped by paintbrushes wonderfully seasoned with mosaic specks from paintings gone by.
Before you know it the room is full of chattering ladies helping each other tie aprons that are as speckled as the paintbrushes.
One by one, ladies venture to inspect the model painting they are going to replicate. They return to purely white canvases with skepticisms at their ability to paint anything that remotely resembles the model set before them.
With reassurances the class is lead, step-by-step, technique-by-technique to lay one layer upon another. Over and over you can hear the words spoken out loud “It doesn’t have to be exactly like the model…give it your own impression…It doesn’t have to be like the person’s next to you.”
Finally, at the end, every canvas is as personal and unique as a name, complete with individuality and self-expression. With every drop of creativity spent, the class ends in a sense of wonder and accomplishment at having actually completed what seemed an unrealistic expectation in the beginning.
Yet that is not all, there is more. While cleaning brushes and handing in aprons, an added and unexpected amazement fills the room. Each of the ladies look around with admiration at a room full of paintings of the same model, each wonderful, but no two the same.
Women, who have never painted before, don't want to. They feel they can't often surpass themselves. Mood and feelings speak through the hands in ways they do not speak through words. A hand artistic expression can be through any medium, paint, crayons, charcoal, pastels, or watercolors. What is most important is that your mood landscape speaks to you. The experience of emotional freedom is hard to commit to words the self-esteem growth is significant. Why don't you try your hand at expressing art in whatever format appeals to you?
