I sigh, even though I really want to rip everything to shreds. Another photo ruined. The watercolour bleeds everywhere, turning the paper into a crinkly mess. I dab at it with a tissue, but I can’t save it.

Our final folio has to include a self-portrait, and it’s the one piece I’ve been avoiding. I can do still lifes and landscapes and portraits of other people very happily, just don’t ask me to look too hard at my own face.

Painting over my school photo was the easiest way I could think of to meet the requirement. I had the idea after I stumbled across an interesting photo of a young geisha. The portrait was from the late 1800s, so before colour photography, but it had been hand-painted so well it almost looked real. The geisha’s cheeks were flushed pink, and the floral pattern of her kimono was meticulously coloured, with daubs of red and yellow and green.

I thought it would be a relatively easy effect to replicate, but I’ve ruined five prints so far. It’s hard to concentrate on anything today. I couldn’t settle in bed last night, and when I look around at my classmates’ faces, I don’t think they slept well either.

I fold the latest botched photo in half and thumb through my sketchbook instead, trying to remember a distant era when I had one good creative concept. At Morrison our Art teachers would give us very specific themes and assignments we had to complete, but Balmoral takes a much looser approach. You’d think that would be good, but actually it is a form of torture. My ideas start solid and sure in my brain, but quickly turn wispy when I try to get them out into the real world.

What I should do is complete my self-portrait, accept its mediocrity, and then free myself to focus on my major project. But I don’t. Instead, I start eavesdropping on Ms Nouri’s consultation with Audrey at the table behind me.

‘I was inspired by the work of early female video artists,’ Audrey says. ‘I want to use my own body and face to explore ideas about connection and place, but also keep a surrealist edge to it.’

I want to roll my eyes, but the fact is, I’m intimidated. I have never made a video good enough to call art; it’s difficult not to look amateur, even though we have access to all this equipment. Balmoral has ten art studios, a photography studio, three darkrooms, a printing room, a dedicated woodwork space, this massive pottery kiln, and a tech studio full of 3D printers and computers loaded up with the latest software.

‘I’ve collected images from all the places around the world my family has lived and projected them onto my skin…’