Thank You!

A few years ago I read Amanda Palmer’s book, The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help. It was born out of her 2013 TED Talk of the same name, and it really spoke to me (both her talk and the book)!

But the main thing I remember about her book was the acknowledgement section:  pages and pages and pages where Amanda thanked everyone who had helped her over the years. (Pages and pages and pages!)

It’s the end of 2018, and Steve and I have so much to be grateful for. I wanted to thank those who have helped us this year here (sentences and sentences!):

1. Thank you to each and every one of you who have purchased classes from us in 2018. We appreciate you so much.
2. Thank you to all of you who signed up for our 365 Year-Long Class, and to Will Sonheim, Jason Poole, and Kara Kramer for helping us create some of the prompts.
3. Thank you to everyone who has purchased one of our books.
4. Thank you to everyone who emailed us this past year, sharing your experiences and artwork. Sometimes your emails were just the encouragement we needed that particular day.
5. Thank you to all of you who recommended our classes or books to your friends!
6. Thank you to our wonderful teachers who taught new classes in 2018: Lendon Noe, Lynn Whipple, Anne Marie Grgich, Tracie Lyn Huskamp, and Anita Lehmann!
7. Thank you to our wonderful teachers who taught classes before this year: Kara Kramer, Bari Zaki, Cat Bennett, Karine Swenson, Diane Culhane, Fred Lisaius, Dar Hosta James, Alison O’Donoghue and Stephanie Hargrave!
8. Thank you to Wes Buckwalter, Harry Edwards and Tina Rowley — our small team of talent who helped us get our website launched in August!
9. Thank you to those who participated in our 2018 Kids Art Week, and to our guest teacher Luna Russell.
10. I usually try to take one in-person workshop and teach one in-person workshop each year. Thank you to Kathie Vezzani of Bellisima Art Escapes (who I taught with in March), and to Melinda Tidwell, whose class I took in September at ArtMakers Denver.
11. Thank you to all of our 32,309 newsletter subscribers!
12. Thank you for reading this blog post right now!
13. And thank you to numerous friends and family who have supported us in every way. Thank you.

Have a WONDERFUL New Year!!

Steve & Carla

 

Collage: Women

I hope you are well today!

The above figures with “tape drapery” are from Lesson 3 of 2019: Year of the Collage, a three-part year-long class with me, Lynn Whipple, and Anne Marie Grgich beginning January 8, 2019. Find details HERE, and have a wonderful week!

NaNoWrMo Report

I had a pretty busy November! Most of it was spent getting everything ready to launch Year of the Collage. But I also participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a “fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing” where participants from all over the world committed to writing a 50,000-word first draft of a novel in November.

My novel was called:

I didn’t write a novel. I don’t think I have one in me! But I have wanted to start writing regularly again, and so I took the challenge.

Since I haven’t written in awhile, I thought I would start out easy. I gave myself permission to just write nonsense. It didn’t matter what I wrote, as long as I got the words in, even if all I wrote was silly.

Well, a lot of it was very silly writing. I wrote sentences like:

“I don’t know what I need or what I’m doing,” “My feet are chilly,” and “Boy, I sure ate a lot of sweets today.”

I’m not kidding! My brain is mush lately.

But I did learn a few things about myself during the month!

1. i learned that i have absolutely no problem typing things without capitalizing words. however, i’m super rigorous about punctuation such as quote marks, commas, periods, dashes, parentheses… i will waste a lot of time going back and fixing any errors. weird.
2. I learned that having a visual chart of my progress each day really helped.
3. I learned that I would sometimes write negative things even if I didn’t feel them. I caught myself several times during the first week writing things like, “Oh, I am so frustrated,” when in fact at that moment I didn’t feel frustrated at all. Or, “Argh… writing is so hard!” when, in fact, it wasn’t really, as I had given myself permission to just type nonsense, and I type pretty fast, so there should have been nothing hard about any of that! So after that first week I started watching what I wrote and making sure that what I was writing and what I was feeling were more aligned.

That last point was kind of huge. And even though I have 50,000 words of (mostly) nonsense to show for November, it was worth it for that reason alone!

Now that it’s December, my daily word count average has dropped, but I’m still writing every day. So… yay!

Registration is now OPEN for our 2019 Year-Long Class!

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“Collage is the twentieth century’s greatest innovation.”
— Robert Motherwell

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2019: Year of the Collage!

Join Carla Sonheim, Lynn Whipple, and Anne Marie Grgich for this year-long celebration of collage! It’s fast, it’s intuitive, it’s fun, and it’s a great way to hone your design skills and create a wonderful body of mixed-media art.

Learn a variety of different techniques from three distinct perspectives on art and mixed media. Presented in three sessions:

Session 1: Carla
January, February, March
Sketchbook Collages, Moon Paper Transparency Collages,
Paper Grids, Abstract Gardens, My-House Dollhouse, and more.

Session 2: Lynn
May, June, July
Color Collages, Design Prompts (with a Side of Play),
Sky Things, Indoor Things, Kitchen Sink Collages, Going Bigger, and more.

Session 3: Anne
September, October, November
Collecting as Meditation, Voluptuous Vessels,
Abstract Accordion Landscape Collages, Faces, and more!

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Class Itinerary

Lessons will go live every two weeks, with a month break in between each class to catch up, catch your breath, and experiment on your own. At the end of the year we will put together a class video/slideshow of your favorite work from the year!

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Some Anne Artwork

 

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Some Lynn Artwork

 

 

 

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Some Carla Artwork

 

Like all of our classes, the learning always goes in both directions, and the community and things we learn from everyone out there are what make the whole experience special. We hope you can join us! Click HERE for details and to sign up!

Carla, Lynn, Anne