What's new? (Patreon)

As we have had a flurry of new supporters this months I figured it was time to re-introduce ourselves! We set up this Patreon to provide work for our tutors & models during the pandemic and to create a platform for us to all to connect through drawing. We're really happy to have received such generous support and this month we reached our funding goal of £6000 per month - meeting our monthly running costs for the first time since last March. This is allowing us to commission some new blog series and run new online events that help to spread the love of drawing - like our new monthly Instagram Live interview series (starting this afternoon at 2pm) in which Laura will be interviewing artist Ryan Humphreys about how he uses photo reference in his work.  Below you'll find future updates about the near future and an overview of who you're helping each month with your support. 

Main Image by Ryan Humpreys aka @withapencilinhand

Where does all the money go? 

Draw is a social enterprise - all of the money we make is invested directly back into our community and the money we raise each month here on Patreon is distributed directly to our models & tutors in paid work. I am the only volunteer at Draw (I make my living writing instructional drawing books) - for all of the rest of the team, teaching and making art is their job, and you are helping to support them with your patronage. 

• 30 of our core life models receive an equal split of 25% of the Patreon income each month as a royalty for the images you draw from - you can always find links to their other work through the photosets. 
• Megan Snyders is an illustrator who works at Draw two days a week - she is behind most of our social media posts and keeps the wheels of Draw turning.
• Lancelot Richardson is an artist who also works at Draw two days a week - he is our main online tutor and leads the Wednesday tutored life drawing course. You also might have read his articles in Artist & Illustrators and Paint & Draw magazine!
• Laura Ryan is a heraldic artist, life model & illustrator - she used to run in-person classes at Draw and will be writing & interviewing for us online this year.
• Shelley Morrow is an artist and used to run our Fridays session - she has been writing blogs for the Patreon and producing artwork for our highest tier supporters. 
• Jade Hylton is an artist, photographer, writer and model - her planned Drawversity events were stopped by the pandemic, but will hopefully be launched in online form in the near future. 
• Scarlett Rebecca is a printmaker & artist - she runs our off-Patreon Printmaking From Home courses. 
• Francesca Cluney is a life model, artist & maker - she leads the model enrichment sessions at Draw. 
• Bella Franks is an artist, teacher & life model and leads our private online life drawing classes. 
• Tim Patrick is a painter who used to run our advanced courses at Draw - he is returning to write some blogs for us very soon.

NB. Our extended teaching team - Hester Berry, Jael O'connor, Olivia Hancock, Sue Haseltine are all still in touch even though we're unable to run in-person sessions with them. 

Draw Online

Online life classes and portrait club started as a sticking plaster to get us through hard times, but they have taken on their own life and allowed us to expand our community beyond the borders of Brighton & Hove. They are not a replacement for real life classes but are something new and different. We'll be continuing all of our online sessions for the foreseeable future and when we can safely open a new Brighton studio we'll be running them in parallel with our in-person programme. If you support us to access all of our online classes, tutorials and reference photos, we have some real treats coming up!

Draw in real life

We closed all of our physical teaching spaces last year and took on a space for storage and staging our Wednesday virtual life classes - this has allowed us to prioritise paying people at Draw, rather than our landlords.  We need to raise money to turn our storage space into a functioning studio before we re-open in-person classes, but we have paid off the costs of downsizing and will be launching a fundraising campaign later this year with a view to re-open when it is safe to. We will only be opening once we know classes will be safe for our community - at the moment we will consider reopening once local virus-transmission is consistently dropping  and cases drop to below 1 case per 1000 people. If you support us to make sure we are able to re-open in future - thank you for your support, we're going to need it for a while longer and we are hugely appreciative of all you have done so far.  

Staying in touch

Draw is a community, and you are part of that community. Here are a few ways you can get more involved:

• You share your artwork with us on the Facebook group here 
• You can get structured feedback on your life and portrait drawing in our Facebook feedback group here 
• You can follow us on Instagram here: @draw_brighton 
• You can follow us on Twitter here: @draw_brighton  
• You can tag your work on twitter and instagram for us to see it @draw_brighton & #drawbrighton
• You can subscribe to out Youtube channel here 

Side note: we've all become a bit desensitised to companies advertising at us, creating customer communities and asking us to follow them. We have nothing to sell you (except these cool badges) - we exist only to teach and promote drawing, because we believe that drawing is important. Our community exists not to support a product, but because community is important and by drawing together we are united by a shared endeavour, whoever and wherever we are. We make money only so that we can distribute it to artists and models, because they need to be paid fairly for their professional work. Your individual support and involvement means so much to each one of us.

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Stay safe and thank you so much for your generosity.

Happy drawing, 

Jake