21 SECRETS summer studios 2019
This program is no longer available for purchase.
Have fun. Keep it simple. Learn a lot.
The 21 SECRETS Summer Studio program was designed to inspire and support artists in keeping our art-journaling practice fresh, fun, and totally do-able no matter what season.
Because we know how jammed packed your life can be, each teacher designed a lesson that will slip easily into your schedule while still enhancing your creative practice and helping you strengthen your skills.
And — because it’s more fun to create in community, there’s a private Facebook group dedicated to each Summer Studio where you can share your work, receive feedback, and mingle with your peers.
The Summer Studio is no longer available for purchase.
IN EACH SUMMER STUDIO YOU WILL RECEIVE…
- Eleven Mini-Lessons. Each mini-lesson consists of three videos (Introduction, Instruction, & Additional Information).
- A downloadable eBook that is yours to keep. All 11 lessons are in one gorgeous, downloadable eBook. If you purchase the bundle you receive 22 lessons!
- Membership to a private Facebook group dedicated to the Summer Studio. This is a great place to receive support and encouragement.
- The opportunity to learn a variety of mixed media techniques and approaches from the comfort of your home/studio. At 21 SECRETS we celebrate everyone’s unique expression and support artists in becoming confident and courageous while creating from the heart!
Click here to see the suggested supply list.
Here are the 11 exciting lessons in 21 secrets playful experiments
In this 11 lessons Summer Studio session, we will embrace a whimsical lightness in our art journals through Playful Experiments! This series of workshops gives us full permission to approach art making as we did when we were children—unafraid to play with new materials and fully trusting in our own imagination. Among many other things, the instructors listed below are eager to share with you the joy of a happy accident, the surprises that come from tapping into your intuition and the ease of creating with things already lying around your house. 21 SECRETS Playful Experiments is the retreat to the treehouse you’ve been longing for!
Click here to view the teacher bios for this edition.
From Distress to De-Stress
with Briana Goetzen
Do you know that song, “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M.? That song came to mind when writing the description for my 21 SECRETS Playful Experiments workshop. I feel the message I wish to convey is that we all have pain, and one way to cope, is through creative expression. My hope is that through expressive mark making, new explorations in mixing media and giving yourself permission to play, you will feel less stressed, and perhaps experience some moments of peace. Let’s de-stress together, because everybody hurts, and you don’t have to go on this journey alone. May it be so.
Quirky Little Mandalas
with Consie Sindet
Let’s combine drippy watercolors and fun doodling on different types of paper to create little designs that are playful and quirky! Join me as we make watercolor dance around the page and then jazz it up with some mark making.
Random Bits of Pattern
with Connie Solera
Wheatpasted on the streets of Oaxaca City, Mexico are political woodcuts handmade by artists. Don’t tell anyone, but every-now-and-then I scratch a tiny bit off and slap it into my sketchbook. I love to use these random bits of pattern to inspire my drawings.
In this Summer Studio I’m bringing the random bits of pattern to you! Together we will create our own pattern sheets that we’ll rip up and glue down as our foundation to spark our imagination and create bold, black-and-white ink drawings.
Creative Discoveries in Mixed Media
with Karen Elaine
Discover your creative spirit while painting intuitively. Play with brilliant acrylic colors and unique mark-making tools to create mysterious layers and delicious textures. This is a process of awakening the creative spirit and allowing yourself to play. The journey begins with energetic acrylic painting and ends in creating details with a variety of mixed-media materials. Be playful and allow yourself the moment to create something as beautiful and as unique as you are!
Seascapes—Creating by the Sea
with Lauren Hooper
Learn to paint the ocean. Most of us find ourselves being pulled to bodies of water during the warmer months—so why not include the sea in our artwork? In this workshop, you will learn acrylic paint-blending techniques to create an ocean scene that captures those summertime feelings.
Take a Walk on the Wild Side
with Lille Diane
Short on time or ideas for your next journal spread? Fix that by taking a walk around your home to gather simple tools and fresh inspiration to create a colorful page filled with sassy pantaloons and a girl’s best friend—shoes! Together we’ll design a Van Gogh-style background using a minimal amount of art supplies to showcase your fashionable legwear and ruby, red slippers. The fun starts when you do! Shoe Be Do Be Do
AQUA Love
with Linda Sagastume
Explore the color AQUA by using liquid acrylic paint washes to create unique shapes and values. Using the grid format, each space will be a place to apply mark making, overlapping washes to create new colors, and a photo image transfer technique. Photo images connect us to a sense of place, an experience and are personal treasures just waiting to find their way onto a journal page. Join me as we explore this process by painting expressively and letting creative intuition be our guide.
Creating with Color and Slow Stitching—An Exploration into Organic Mark Making
with Rae Missigman
In Creating with Color and Slow Stitching, learn to embrace the organic movement in your work as you explore your way through color, pattern, texture and stitching. As you immerse yourself into the art of creating, you will experiment with letting go of the rules and dive in to the practice of making your tools work for you. Discover yourself in the marks as your paint and stitch your way to a one-a-kind work of art.
Remains of the Day
with Sharon Stanley
The clipping and pasting of paper scraps is surely one of the most satisfying ways of expressing oneself in an art journal and one of the simplest. In this workshop we will use scraps from past projects, recycled papers and other “remains of the day” to dso just that. This will provide a slate for doodling that’s original, fun and easy!
Party of ONE: What color are HUE?
with Stephanie Ignazio
This watercolor workshop is all about exploring and playing with the beauty of color. We will invite one color to be the star of the show and celebrate all of its amazing variations. One tube of paint, one brush; one piece of art that sings!
Playing in the Dark
with Susie Stonefield Miller
A fun and surprising technique using spray inks, black gesso and white paint and paint pens. The beauty of this workshop is in the magic of the surprise!
Here are the 11 exciting lessons in 21 secrets capturing moments
Summer can be one of our favorites times of the year to capture adventures with family and friends, as well as savor the daily moments of our favorite summer routines. This 11 lessons Summer Studio session celebrates the ways we can document the details of our lives be it the weather, the places we visit or the simple things we do in beautifully-mundane moments. Lessons from the instructors below will inspire us to see our art journals as a tools for Capturing Moments of our busy (and sometimes not-so-busy) lives.
Click here to view the teacher bios for this edition.
The Artist Date
with Caylee Grey
Travel journals are one of my favorite ways to create, but there’s no need to wait for a Parisian or Thai overseas escapade. You can have a small adventure in the now—like, tomorrow-kind-of *now*. All you need are a few of your favorite supplies (that—guess what—you already have), and a willingness. I believe in living life deliberately, and part of that is creating everyday adventures. One of the ways I do that is through the artist date. The artist date is a concept by the great Julia Cameron. For me, it’s a way to romance my artist self. Artist dates always lead to a filling of my creative well and an outpouring of art. In this workshop, I’ll take you along on a planned artist date with me, and show you how to incorporate these into your own life.
Studio Treasures
with Connie Solera
I love to use watercolor sketching as a way of capturing objects, places and moments from my everyday life. So why not use it in capturing those wonderful studio treasures we all adore — ART SUPPLIES! In this workshop we’re going to gather the supplies we treasure most in our studio and elevate their importance by creating a painting purely in their honor. I’ll show you how to use a Tombow Dual Brush pen as your sketching tool and an easy way to simplify your drawing and create an interesting composition using frames. Gather those studio treasures and come join me!
Maximizing Your Art
with Debi Adams
In this course, you will learn how to expand your art into different dimensions and layers by applying different materials and elements onto the work surface. Knowing what to choose and when to stop will be addressed. Discovering different ways to use your art with a purpose in mind will round out the workshop.
Shades of Gray
with Jane LaFazio
Drawing and shading with a black water-soluble pen and waterbrush. Learn how to use shades of gray to depict volume and shape quickly.
Endless Summer Concertina Sketchbook
with Kellee Wynne Conrad
From the mundane to the extraordinary, capture the spirit of your daily life in panoramic view as the pages of an accordion sketchbook unfold.
Joy Seeker
with Liz Lamoreux
Finding and celebrating slices of joy in my everyday life has become a powerful creative and mindfulness practice that I use amidst the ups and downs a day can hold. In this class, I’ll share a glimpse into the ways I explore the practice of joy seeking, and I’ll teach you about how I take what I find through my photos and observations and turn them into art journal pages. You’ll then go on your own joy seeking adventures and create journal pages from what you discover.
Make a Great Day! Using Your Photos and Line Art in Your Art Journal
with Lynne Hudson
Looking for a fresh way to add your own photographs and images to your art journal? We’ll use the Inkwork App to turn our own photos into line drawings. Once they’re printed, we’ll add them to our art journals, add our own marks and lines to extend the image and add our text with thoughts of the day. You’ll love the bold, crisp look of this art-journaling style. You might even find yourself creating a library of images for other art projects! We’ll use a blank art journal, Sharpie markers, Tombow markers and a good dose of humor to create art-journal spreads from even the most humdrum of days. (I promise, I’ve made an entire spread about a chair.) Using your own photos from the day helps you capture your day in images and gets you ready for reflection. Adding color feels a little bit like coloring and it’s your own work! Whether you’re a seasoned artist or a complete newbie, you’ll enjoy playing along as we make our mark on the day. Remember when you loved to cut and paste? This is version 2.0. Grab your phone, glue stick and scissors and let’s have some fun!
Collect and Connect
with Molly Anthony
In this workshop, we will learn how taking the time to walk slowly, stopping to pick things up and pausing to interact with nature can teach us to capture simple moments and create important memories we would otherwise let slip away. We’ll piece together scraps to create a bigger picture, we’ll embrace imperfection and we’ll illustrate memories from our daily lives using objects and inspiration we encounter while taking a walk. Using supplies you already have, you’ll learn to create beautiful pages in your journal that will take you back to a simple moment each time you view the page.
Postcards to Myself
with Rachel Rose
What if everyday offered a moment worth holding forever? Learn to use creative mindfulness to capture a memory from your day through expressive shape, line, color and writing. With simple supplies use your art to go deeper, and create a postcard to yourself as a reminder of what gifts lay hidden in each moment.
A Personal Note: Telling the Story
with Sarah Huizenga
Our favorite photographs stir emotions. They evoke memories. Sometimes we even print our favorite images and hang them on the wall. Why? To remember, to relive the joy, to remind ourselves of that moment in time. But how often do we tell the story that lies behind the image.
In this workshop, you will choose one of your favorite photographs to carbon transfer onto your art journal page. From there you will embed into the foundation of that photograph the story behind the image. Whether is a letter to the subject, a mantra or phrase, or your memory of that moment; together, we will use our art journals to share from the heart.
Then you will chose how much of the story to leave reveled, covering the rest with layers of paper and paint. No matter the amount of layers, your heart will know the story that lies underneath.
This Moment—A Symphony of Emotive States
with Tonia Jenny
Our complete emotional state at any given moment, on any given day cannot be expressed as a single color, texture or emoticon. Who you are right now is a symphony of instruments—each one representing a different area of your life. I’m going to share with you a fun and easy process for creating a highly-visual “snapshot” that reflects your entire inner state—in this moment. We’ll play with watercolors and mixed media and when we’re finished, we may even have a new appreciation for our emotive complexity.
Cancellation & Refund Policy
21 SECRETS is non-refundable and non-transferable.
But please email us if you are having an issue.
We want you to be happy and make art.