Gain confidence and skills as you explore the beauty, versatility, and fun of watercolor painting. This class is for absolute beginners. Everyone can have fun in a no-pressure environment while building the foundation to continue to explore this media and grow as a watercolor artist! This course meets online via zoom with supplemental instructional videos provided. Email required.  Supply list and Zoom link provided upon registration.

Explore the beauty of nature as you record your observations, gaining skills and confidence in depicting natural forms, organizing your sketches, and learning to see the wonder and beauty that surrounds us.  This course is pressure-free for artists of all skill levels who would like to learn how to sketch in the field and from photos to celebrate nature in a more personal and expressive way. Discover a new way to appreciate the wonders of nature! This course meets online via zoom.  Email required.  Supply list and Zoom link provided upon registration. 

Poetry is a wonderful way to celebrate and reflect on our lives. This relaxing class introduces stress-free steps to appreciate and write poetry that can be used in memoirs, scrapbooks, journals, children’s books, and even your own poetry collection!  This class is for beginners—even if you’ve never written a poem before, as well as poets who would like to expand their techniques and be part of a supportive writing community.  We will be exploring the brainstorming process, practicing different techniques, poetic devices and forms, and the steps in revising our poems to make them say just what we hope to share. Most of all, we will celebrate the beauty in our lives and of our world as we write! Email required.  Zoom link provided upon registration. 

Celebrate nature—from capturing the majesty of skyscapes and landscapes to focusing on the small but beautiful plants, animals, and fungi we often overlook. This course is pressure-free, sharing techniques to portray nature while providing freedom of expression and style, exploring a variety of techniques and approaches to painting nature in watercolor. This course meets online via zoom with supplemental instructional videos available provided. Email required.  Supply list and Zoom link provided upon registration. 

Gouache is a medium that provides the velvety texture of oil paint with the convenience and easy clean-up of watercolor. It can be used much like watercolor in transparent washes, but also opaquely, giving the painting a robust, rich feeling. It is often used in illustration—from children’s books to scientific and nature studies and trendy commercial designs. In this stress-free class, we will explore, invent, and celebrate the versatility of this medium and help each artist discover their unique voice in gouache. (Note that most of the demonstrations are using traditional gouache, but you can do most of the same things with acrylic gouache, too). This course meets online via zoom with supplemental instructional videos available provided. Email required.  Supply list and Zoom link provided upon registration. 

At the end of autumn when snow and ice come to stay, we can have a hard time connecting to nature. But each season brings new beauty, mystery, and meaning. In this class, we will follow the season’s guidance in reflection and meditation, appreciating the beauty of bare branches and crisp ochre bunches of grass crusted with ice. We’ll let nature nurture our souls as we reflect on the warmth and connections we find. In this pressure-free class, we will learn ways to immerse ourselves in nature without shivering, to celebrate the change of seasons, and express ourselves through writing. This course meets online via zoom.  Email required.  Zoom link provided upon registration. 

In this class, we will be playing with the combination of short poems and images and writing poems that can be integrated with personal images - whether old family photos, children’s artwork, your own photography or paintings, drawings, etc. This is a stress-free class that provides the foundation for exploring self-expression in poetry that can bring joy and connection. This is also a great way to enhance records of your own family’s history, to celebrate moments in your life, or expand your creative expression in your visual art. Our focus will be on Haiku and other short poem forms from China and Japan that don’t require rhyme or meter but can create powerful moments of insight into the beauty of our lives. This course meets online via zoom. A link will be sent for the online course meeting room on zoom after registration.