Leah Storrs-Fisher’s Artwork Captures the Beauty of the Outdoors

For Leah Storrs-Fisher, the great outdoors isn’t just a source of artistic inspiration — it’s the foundation of her creative life. The Columbus-based watercolorist and printmaker cherishes the childhood years she spent playing outdoors in rural Michigan, harnessing those memories to create intricate paintings and prints as Leah Storrs-Fisher Studio.

“My grandparents had 50 acres of land with woods on it,” Storrs-Fisher says. “I grew up barefoot and running through the woods pretty much. Being outside and being around native plants … was very much ingrained in me.”

In 2008, she moved to Ohio to attend the Columbus College of Art and Design, majoring in fine art with a minor in art history. Storrs-Fisher graduated in 2012 and worked for a local business for four years before making her craft a full-time operation in 2016. Her works depict beautiful landscapes, botanicals and other nature-inspired designs, with Ohio’s state bird being a perennial favorite.

“If you were to go through my feed, you’d notice four or five different interpretations of a cardinal,” she says.

Storrs-Fisher uses a combination of screen-printing and watercolor techniques to bring her designs to life. She starts by drawing the design onto clear plastic acetate sheets and then uses a photo process to expose it into a screen. Next, she pulls ink through the screen and transfers the design to a textured paper. This establishes the black linework of her image before she fills in the gaps with watercolor paints.

Storrs-Fisher screen prints in bulk, creating up to 100 in one sitting. She later pulls 10 to 15 of these prints at a time to hand-paint them, applying one color highlighting a specific element across all the pieces before moving on to the next color. (Her goldfinch, for example, uses orange for the beak, black for the head and wing and yellow for the body.)

“Learning about plants and birds and things like that was just very much part of my upbringing,” Storrs-Fisher says. “I think naturally it was bound to come out in my work.”

For more information, visit leahstorrsfisher.com.

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