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Start drawing!
building a compassionate
sketchbook practice
This class will combine lecture, tutorials, and practical art skills to help you start drawing confidently.
While you learn skills and techniques, you’ll uncover how the power of self-compassion can sustain a sketchbook practice for the long haul!
class begins march 28th 2025
each class is 2 hours (9:00-11:00AM pst)
live sessions are on march 28th, april 4th, and april 18th.
we will take a one week practice break april 11th for you to work, test, wobble, learn, and catch up before our final session.
Mel is an amazing artist and not always are amazing artists good teachers. But they have a tremendous facility to impart their knowledge to their students in a relatable way. I have taken two classes from them and hope to take many more. Loved this class too!
Kim - digital painting & watercolor class student
I love many things in my life, but drawing has always stuck around through the winding roads of grief, loss, and rebirth. Drawing is a guide, an anchor, a way to remember, and a deep honoring of our inner artists.
drawing class syllabus
learning outcomes for each week:
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This week will be all about learning how to use the materials and overcome the fear of the blank page. You will watch me demo how to spot and see with a viewfinder, how to setup and draw objects from observation, and then start exploring the wobbly process that will feel scary at first. But don't worry! I'll be blending tricky and challenging exercises with playful ones to avoid taking ourselves too seriously. You'll be encouraged to work with crayons and thick graphite to simplify what you see. The results will surprise you!
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In week two we will start exploring new ways to see through shape and shadows. You'll learn to draw with an eraser, find out if you're more of a sculptor or an architect with your drawings, and root into which materials bring you the most joy to work with. We will spend some time giving each other gentle feedback on our work because in compassionate community, our unconscious intentions and magical style emerge. This will be the most supportive critique room, with lots of gentle guidelines to frame our discussions.
After compassionate critique, we will build intentions for how you want to use your sketchbook long term. Sketchbooks can be our best teachers!
We will end class with an assignment to walk outside and observe. We'll discuss spotting and attempting to draw compositions in nature, and what it means to have fun and adapt to being wrong. If uncertainty or perfection tends to stop you, you're going to love this lesson.
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This week is all about applying what we learned in weeks 1 and 2 to actual reps and practice in our sketchbook. Everyone will be encouraged to spend the week “embracing the wobble” — happy accidents, experiments, and strange results. These are the things that make our art uniquely human and slowly reveal our art style.
With supportive feedback in a secret Discord channel all week, you’ll take each of the concepts demonstrated in weeks 1 and 2 and try them using the unique subject matters of interest and start finding, and fumbling towards your voice. In this practice week the work you do or don’t do will reveal what’s essential to keep you persisting in your practice.
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In our final week we will learn how to break the rules and do things in our unique way. We'll talk about how to design and create spreads, understand how different versions of one image can reveal interesting things and learn strategies for integrating text into our sketchbooks. You’ll get a lecture from me on designing your pages and finding resources to study from, as well as what do we do when we stop our practice or fall out of the habit.
In this class we will also have another compassionate critique session and then dive deep into using self-compassion and our sketchbook intentions to keep us persisting and building our practice of drawing. You’ll walk away from this week ready to integrate this practice into your busy life. Understanding the ups and downs of creative flow and feeling ready to maintain your work for years to come, and build some excellent relationships with fellow artists who can keeps supporting you along the way.
i’ve been keeping an
adventure sketchbook
since 2023 wanna peek inside?
FAQ
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This class is definitely for you if:
Drawing has always seemed intimidating and activates your inner critic
You want the art you make to be guided by curiosity and a tender honoring of the world around you
You've been searching for an analog way to play that feels fun
You're longing to deepen into the process of making art, rather than the product or result
You want to create through drawing as a meaningful craft with manageable goals to keep improving
Having community around to support your art sounds amazing
This class is for beginner and intermediate artists looking to build, sustain, or restart a practice of keeping a sketchbook for self-study. No previous drawing or art experience is needed for this class.
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the supply list for this class is quite simple. We will focus on using graphite, crayons, and markers during our time together.
Have supply questions? When you purchase the class, i share detailed suggestions for each supply on our class website!
a sketchbook
a set of drawing pencils
Pencil sharpener
a box of crayons
a clip to hold your sketchbook open
two brush-tip markers
erasers, 1 clic eraser, 1 kneaded eraser.
graphite crayon 6B
1 graphitone or water soluble graphite pencil in 4B
1 1/2” paintbrush
1 cup for water
bonus (optional, not necessary. I will demo with these on occasion)
colored pencils
watercolor set (tubes or pans)
fun pens, pencils, and supplies that speak to you/that you’ve had in your collection
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Self-Compassion is a term coined by Psychologist Dr. Kristen Neff and it is a practice of extending kindness to yourself when dealing with uncertainty and failure - two big things that drawing can bring up! You can learn more about it through Dr. Neffs website.
The use of self-compassion in our class is to teach art through a compassion-centered perspective. To develop a practice we can sustain through the negative emotions it might bring up for us.
In my 14 years of teaching, too often students are working with a lack of safety or deep feelings of discomfort from past trusted adults discouraging their art.
In this class, all feedback, critiques, and conversations are designed to encourage your creative flourishing.
Self-compassion is the tool we’ll use to tend warmly to our selves when soft struggles arise in our work.
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This is entirely the point of my YouTube channel! You should check out this video and this video to get a sense of the vibes I’ll be bringing to the classroom.
want to read an essay on
why im teaching this class?
In this newsletter dispatch, i share the reasons why i didn’t keep a sketchbook for a majority of my art career.
Yet, coming to the practice 10 years after graduating from art school to recover my creative voice felt, essential.
ai- free guarantee
at no point during this class or in the creation of the lesson plans have I used or intend to use any form of generative AI. Human creativity is too precious to offload to a chat bot. Everything I create for you will be crafted through my 13 years of teaching expertise with your human experience in mind.