December 2021: Patreon Update (Patreon)

Hello lovely patrons,

If you're new here, welcome! If you're a seasoned Draw supporter, thank you so much for sticking with us and helping to keep the community strong. It's been a while since I've sent an update so I thought I'd pop you a message to say hi and to update you on our plans here at Draw, so here's a run down of what we're planning this month. As always, thank you so much for your ongoing support; at a time of such uncertainty I am so grateful too be part of a community of such generous and creative people.

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Christmas Live Programme

We're running a limited live programme over the Christmas week - this will be the first full week off I've had since March 2020, and a rare full week off for Megan but we'll be scheduling plenty of posts to keep you inspired next week while we're away from our screens. We'll be back with a full programme on the week of the 27th December, so here is a summary of the live online sessions coming up. You'll notice that we're opening portrait club up to all supporters for the two weeks of Christmas so that everybody can come join us for some festive drawing:

Thursday 16th Dec
7-8pm (UK time) Portrait Club (Portrait tier+)

Thursday 23rd Dec
7-8pm (UK time) Portrait Club (All supporters)

Monday 27th Dec   
6-8pm (UK time) Online Portrait Drawing (Portrait tier+)

Wednesday 29th Dec    
10-11am (UK time) Online Life Drawing (All supporters)
1-2pm (UK time) Online Life Drawing (All supporters)
7-8pm (UK time) Online Life Drawing (All supporters)

Thursday 30th Dec  
7-8pm (UK time) Portrait Club (All supporters)

 January onwards - all sessions running as normal

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Photo-sets

In advance of the new Drawversity series that will be launched in January we'll have some fantastic photo-sets coming out this month; you can see previews of the sets coming out this month here. Our aim is to ultimately create the most affordable and ethical library of photo-reference on the internet, with our models being paid a monthly royalty for their contributions, so thank you for helping us do that! I'll be sending out a questionnaire in the new year to get your votes on what you'd like to see next and you can find all of the past sets on the Draw Navigator. 

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Future plans

From January onwards we'll be launching our new feedback system, where our tutors will be providing weekly individual feedback on artwork and answering your questions via Slack. We have previously given feedback via Facebook, so thanks for your patience as we make the switch over to our new platform. Watch this space for more details on how the Slack feedback will work...

Unfortunately, the drop in Patreon support over the last few months has taken us below our minimum running costs of £6000 per month and we've had to cut our future ETC talks and Instagram Live interviews to make up for the loss of budget. If you'd like to see the talks and interviews return, encourage your friends to sign up to support the Patreon! If we can get back to a consistent £6000+ per month, we'll be able to re-introduce the talks in future. 

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Where does all the money go?

Draw is a social enterprise; all of the money we make here is re-invested into our community of models, artists and tutors. All of the team at Draw are paid freelancers; I volunteer for Draw three days a week and don't take any money from Draw (my income comes from writing instructional drawing books). You find details about how our Patreon income is spent here. Alongside the usual pay and royalties distributed to our 40+ artists & models we have used money raised on the Patreon in October, November and December to fund all of this:

• Drawversity photo shoot - The Drawversity programme was originally conceived in 2019 by Draw tutor Jade Hylton as a way of encouraging a more diverse range of models into life modelling. We'll be running a live Drawversity programme at the Draw studio in the new year, but Jade has also directed our latest reference photo shoot, with photos being released from January 2022. Your support allows us to pay all the models, artists and photographers involved fairly for producing incredible images as inspiration for your drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures. 
• Making videos more accessible - Your monthly support is helping us to make all of our tutorial and demo videos more accessible. People often assume that all closed captions are automated, but they're not - although we use the best available software to speed things up it still takes several hours to transcribe, check and correct the captions on a 1-hour video to make that they are accessible for our hearing-impaired users. Every week Megan adds closed captions to more of our back catalogue of talks and videos, funded by your support - we hope to have them all captioned by the end of next year. 
• Subsidising live sessions - it is so important to us that we are able to run in-person sessions. Our physical studio is the heart of our community in Brighton, but with Covid restrictions we'd need to price our 2-hour life classes at £25 per person if we wanted them to break even. The Patreon is allowing us to subsidise every ticket to ensure that our sessions don't become elitist, but remain affordable for everybody. 
• Sick pay and cancelation pay - over the past few months we've seen a predictably high level of models and tutors having to call in sick for classes. Because of your support we've been able to offer them full sick pay, and full pay if we have to cancel the session. This helps us to incentivise behaviour that keeps the community safe and to make sure that our models and tutors can stay working as freelancers during this pandemic. 

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Ongoing support

We are all hugely grateful for your ongoing support and I'm also conscious that finances can be tight in January. Remember that you can change your tier of support at any time to a more affordable tier - our discounted Student Tier is available to anybody in finical need who wants to access all of our resources but can't afford to maintain the higher monthly costs of the Portrait and Life Drawing Tier. Our aim is to strike a balance between making the Patreon affordable to everybody, while providing fair pay to the people who contribute to it. If you're unsure of whether you qualify for a discount, please do email me on info@draw-brighton.co.uk. 

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Thanks for all your support and have a lovely Christmas, 

Jake