Patreon Update 2023 (Patreon)

Hello lovely people,

With both January and the lunar new year very much passed I figured it was about time to give you all an update on what 2023 has in store for the Draw Brighton Patreon. Megan and I see every new person who supports the Patreon and it is so exciting to see our cohort of supporters continuing to grow beyond our UK bubble into an international community of people who love to draw. If you're new to the Patreon, welcome! If you've been here a while, thank you so much for helping us continue to make our drawing sessions available to everybody. If you wanted to get an insight into who we are you might want to take a look at our Journals here. Bellow you'll find a summary our plans for the year ahead:

COURSES

Portrait Drawing

My new online course Portrait Drawing launches this month for anybody on the Portrait, Life or Student Tiers! The course will be released as a series of weekly video tutorials and set exercises by me, supported with feedback from Lance on the Draw Slack. As the course is pre-recorded you'll be able to follow along at your own pace, either watching the videos as they come out, or following them at your own pace, returning to the archive of lessons as they build up. It is intended for all abilities and will start at a level accessible for complete beginners, with more advanced optional exercises built into each week. The videos will be arranged in stand-alone terms with the first term focusing on observational exercises - to get the most from the course you'll need 2-3 hours per lesson to watch the recording and practice the exercises. The course develops on some of the ideas I explored in my portrait drawing book, but gives me the opportunity to go much deeper into a lot of the topics and I'm really excited to be sharing it with everybody! 

• February 6th - we'll be releasing the full list of dates and materials list for the course. 
• February 13th - the course begins, with the first course video released on Monday 13th. 
• New videos will be released every Monday, allowing you to watch them and practice any day of the week. 

Life Drawing

Lance's comprehensive life drawing course can always be accessed via the Draw Navigator. You can follow it in order as a 34 week course, or you can dip into it when you need help on a particular topic, getting direct feedback from Lance on the Draw Slack whenever you need it. 

• The blog-only version is available to ALL supporters
• The full version with video tutorials, demonstrations and practice photo-sets is available to Life Drawing and Student Tier supporters

LIVE ONLINE SESSIONS

We'll be continuing the programme of live sessions in its current form for the year ahead, with no breaks - you're always welcome to upgrade for a month and downgrade again if you want to access more sessions. We now record the Wednesday evening life drawing session as well as the Monday portraits sessions to them accessible to more people.

• Monday Portrait Drawing (Life, Student & Portrait Tier supporters)
• Wednesday Life Drawing (weekly for Life & Student Tier supporters, last Wednesday of the month for all supporters)
• Thursday Portrait Club (All supporters)

PHOTO-SETS

Last year we asked for your feedback on the kind of photo-sets you want to see in future and we have the list of ideas pinned to the wall here at the studio! We were planning an autumn shoot, but this had to be cancelled as we recovered from the shock of our 2022 electricity bill. With a surge of new members this year we've secured the budget for our 2023 shoots and will be holding the first one in a few weeks time. We're hoping to work with some new photographers in addition to Olly this year and we're going to be putting together more narrative tableau in addition to inviting a wider age-range of portrait sitters, introducing several new models to pose for our life photo-sets. 

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IN-PERSON DISCOUNTS

If you are in Brighton, UK and make it to any of our in-person sessions then being a Patreon supporter will give you a discount on most classes! You'll get £3 off of our 2-hour sessions and up to £30 off of longer courses - just book with the reduced price on the website. 

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ETC ARTIST TALKS

We have built up a neat little collection of recorded interviews which you can revisit to help you get inspired and to gain an insight into the practices of working artists. Our past interviews include Chris Riddell, Caragh Savage and Wuon-Gean Ho with many more HERE on our YouTube channel. In 2023 we're planning 4 quarterly talks - details of the speakers will be shared here on Patreon. 

ABOUT US

We're a small arts organisation based in Brighton in the UK made up of a gaggle of freelance artist/tutors who run in-person drawing classes from our studio & online and a team of brilliant life models who pose for those sessions. Since we started in 2009 our aim has been to foster a supportive drawing, create affordable opportunities for people to learn to draw and to provide fairly paid, creative work for artists and models.  

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WHERE DOES ALL THE MONEY GO?

We are a non-profit making organisation and all of the money we make here is re-invested into our community of models, artists and tutors. I volunteer for Draw three days a week (my income comes from writing instructional drawing books and teaching for galleries) while all of the team at Draw are paid freelancers. Alongside the usual pay and royalties distributed to our 50 artists & models we have used the money raised on the Patreon this summer to fund:

• Cost of living pay increase - we've put up pay for freelancers working in-person at Draw by 10% and have committed to pay increases that follow inflation in the UK. We're reviewing our online model pay this month. 
• Model hardship support - at the start of the pandemic we started a hardship fund for models in finical difficulty. As more models find themselves in financial straights we've been helping them to invest in better home filming and lighting equipment as well as making ossciaioal cost-of-living payments for those on the lowest incomes.
• Sick pay - the Draw Patron funds sick pay for our freelance models and from this year we've extended that to cover classes taught by all of our tutors. 
• Electricity - yeah, it's a cliché of the times but as costs rise in the UK, the Patreon is helping to subsidise our in-person sessions as we build a more sustainable business model for our Brighton studio.  

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Finally, a reminder 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 financial need who wants to access all of our resources but can't afford higher monthly costs. If you're feeling particular comfortable and generous, you're  welcome to increase the amount you pay for your tier each month and if you're planning to support us for a whole year I'd recommend signing up as an annual supporter to save 10% on the monthly costs. 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.

Happy drawing,

Jake