This is a book of 175 art prompts about Canada. The real one. Hockey tape, beaver dams, the 80-degree temperature mood swing between January and July, a drive-through line that wraps the building before 7 AM, and a prairie horizon so flat you can see a storm coming for hours.
Twenty-five subjects are organized into five sections: Shared Symbols, What We Wear, Our Land, Creatures of the Land, and Ordinary Canada. Each subject gets context, a main drawing prompt, alternate approaches, surprising facts, and follow-up activities. There's enough material in a single entry to fill a week, or you can flip to something new every day.
Every prompt follows the same structure. Context gives you the cultural or natural history behind the subject. Make Something gives you a direction to try. Alternate approaches offer different materials, angles, or constraints. Did You Know? drops a fact that might change how you think about what you've been making. Keep Going gives you more ways in.
You don't need to be good at art. You need something to mark with, something to mark on, and a willingness to make something you might hate. Both outcomes are fine.
The subjects range from the Canadian flag to the end of a dock, from northern lights to a Tim Hortons drive-through line, from salmon fighting upstream to the mittens drying on the heating vent. The prompts work with any medium: pencil, paint, collage, found materials, whatever you reach for.
Written by a self-taught artist who can't draw a maple leaf from memory either.
About the Author :
Lisa Solonynko is a Canadian artist, volunteer art educator, and military spouse. She works primarily in watercolour and photography, both self-taught through the reliable method of doing it badly until she didn't. She volunteers as an art educator for disabled and neurodiverse adults.
