Summer 2023 Update (Patreon)

Hello dear friends and patrons!

We’ve had a recent influx of new people to our online community and broke 1000 Patreon supporters for the first time last week! I wanted to send this little newsletter to welcome everybody who is new here and to update all of you on what we have planned for the months ahead. If you are new and wanted to get an insight into who we are you might want to take a look at our Journals here. It’s also a good idea to check out our short video on Navigating the Patreon to understand how to find your way around.

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FINDING BALANCE

We're a small arts organisation with a physical studio in Brighton, UK and a rag-tag band of freelance artist, tutors and models spread across the world. 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. Patreon has given us a platform for connecting with an international community in a way we couldn’t have imagined – as our in-person sessions have finally begun to recover from the impacts of covid over this summer and our online community has continued to grow it has been an exciting challenge to balance the growth of our sessions with our increasing costs, while keeping our sessions affordable for everybody. We decided this summer to increase the number of days some of our crew are working so that we can continue to improve and expand what we can offer you all and to make sure we can get back to all of your messages and questions nice and quickly, so thank you for bearing with us as we continue to fine tune our working hours!

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COURSES

Portrait Drawing Course

Since we launched our Portrait Course it has been a steep learning curve in producing pre-recorded online tutorials. We’d initially hoped each video would take 2 days to produce and we’d be able to release them weekly but the videos take closer to a full week to make, so we’ve had to spread the release of the course over a longer period. To make sure we’re not disappointing anybody we’ve decided to change to guaranteeing the release to one lesson each month and making the supporting material more substantial. The course can be revisited any time, so once released it can be followed at a faster pace, or spread over a longer time as you prefer. Patreon’s system of community patronage helps us to develop these resources for everybody and make them available at a much more affordable rate than equivalent pre-prepared courses – none-the-less we aim to be as reliable as possible with what we send out so thank you for being so patient waiting for us to get back up to speed. The next video will be released in the next two weeks, after which we’ll be releasing them monthly.

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

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LIVE ONLINE SESSIONS

Our recorded Wednesday life drawing sessions have been a big hit with each new recording added to our growing archive. We’ll be continuing with our programme exactly as it is for the foreseeable future. This year we will not be missing any online sessions during the Christmas break, so we’ll run our sessions as normal over the festive period. The following sessions run every single week of the year, including during Christmas and summer holidays:

• Monday Portrait Drawing / 6-8pm (UK Time) / Life, Student & Portrait Tier supporters
• Wednesday Life Drawing  / 10-11am, 1-2pm, 7-8:30pm (UK Time) / Weekly for Life & Student Tier supporters, last Wednesday of the month for all supporters
• Thursday Portrait Club / 10-11am, 1-2pm, 7-8:30pm (UK Time) / All supporters

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PHOTO-SETS

We’ve had some great feedback on our collaboration with Justyna Neryng since releasing our first sets in the Spring. Later in the year we’re planning to shoot more multi-model compositions and the artist-inspired photosets requested in our last survey. In response to past requests and building upon our impromptu bathroom photoshoot this summer we planning a ‘domestic tableau’ themed photo set series for release next year – we’ll send the next teaser preview at the end of September. In the meantime, you’ll find our current release schedule HERE.

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ONLINE FEEDBACK

Throughout the summer, if you’d like feedback on your work you can still post up on Slack using our existing system and you’ll get feedback from the lovely Lance. Based on our last survey the majority of you were keen for us to migrate over to Discord so we’ll be making that happen in the autumn and sending you all an update of how to use the new system.

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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 rest of the team at Draw are paid freelancers. 25% of our Patreon income is paid out in royalties each month to our 50 core models, 60% of the Patreon income goes into running our online sessions & commissioning new photosets and 10% goes into subsidising out in-person classes. We’ve used the remaining income this summer to fund:

• Model hardship fund – as our freelancers become stretched been stagnant pay with other organisations and increasing costs we’ve had a record number or requests to out model and have been able to hand out sup[port grants to cover unexpected bills and investments in new equipment.
• Sick pay – The costs of illness remain high post-lockdown and the Patreon allows us to pay sick pay to models and tutors at Draw, helping to set a more compassionate precedent and ensure that all of our crew have time to recover when they’re ill.
• Sponsorship – we’ve been able to continue to sponsor other groups and initiatives aimed at increasing diversity in life modelling and drawing communities, most recently ESEA life drawing and our ongoing Drawversity programme.
• Portrait club – the Patreon funds our free in-person portrait drawing session in Brighton, offering an opportunity for people to draw for free in a welcoming environment. Started by Emma and now run by Lance (with regular support form Jade) the session has been our best attended in-person event all year.

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Thank you for all of your support helping us to run classes and indulge our ideas for courses and photo-sets. Amongst the increasing challenges of the world it is a privilege to be connected to such a vibrant and supportive community.

Happy drawing,

Jake