I Launch a Patreon Site for Sketching and Painting Videos

Today I’m launching Patreon/RozInterim, a subscription blog on which I’ll publish studio sketching, painting, and collage sessions and posts on creativity and process. You can click on the link to go and check it out. There are already 2 sample videos up which are public so you can see what I’m talking about. (See the video at the end of this post for an explanation of my Patreon site.)

This is the real-time version so you can get a sense of the timing of things. 

This is the sped-up or compressed time version that is available to people subscribing at the first Tier level—it’s designed for people who don’t want to spend time waiting for paint to dry, but do still want to see process.

December’s monthly videos for subscribers are also up. And I have some posts that will go up this week related to these videos.

You may recall that I wrote in the fall that I started taping my studio sketching sessions in an effort to look at how my process was changing since the cataract surgery. Now I’ve edited a bunch of them. If process is something that you’re interested in and you enjoy watching people paint I hope you’ll check them out.

I realize that subscription blogs aren’t for everyone. I will still be posting on RozWoundUp.com, though not three times a week. The situation with my eyes has changed my focus in almost every area of my life and it will take some time to sort all this out.

In the meantime the subscription blog enables me to stay in touch with students and readers to carry on a dialog about process.

About My Patreon Site

At the link given at the start of this post you’ll find the website and the three tier levels for subscribing explained. I’d like to take a moment to write a little more about what you’ll find there.

The sped up or condensed time version will be available for Tier 1 subscribers and will not have audio because of compression, and may or may not have callouts.

The real time sketch videos show me working in exactly that—real time. (I do edit out things like getting up to change rinse water, or time spent reaching for a new tube of paint.)

These videos will include callouts or a voiceover as I decide is necessary to augment your understanding of what is happening in the video. In some of the most recent videos, as I worked out issues with my microphone, I started to get quite chatty! 

Information included in the real-time videos might include pigment names, brush types and sizes, paper, material brands, and of course, some descriptions of why I am doing what I’m doing—why I’m making some creative choices.

One of the first things I noticed after cataract surgery (besides the obvious flare, glare, and clarity issues) was that I was sketching much more slowly than usual. A sketch that might have taken me 20 minutes before was taking me 40 or more minutes after surgery.

My speed has increased a bit in the past month, but is nothing like pre-surgery speeds. It depends on what style I wish to work in and the state of my eyes at sketching time. 

Most real time videos will be from 20 to 90 minutes. You’ll see the whole process from the blank piece of paper through to the finished scan.

For years I have been shifting my interest in painting to more and more interest in surface texture. That will continue as my approach loosens to accommodate my “new” eyes.

My goal is not to discuss the vision issues at length. (I’ll have a post about my vision on RozWoundUp in January—I just had some end-of-year posts up first.) My goal on Roz Interim is to share with you the path I take to find a way back to drawing after realizing I would never see in a certain way again.

For me what is important is that we keep responding to our environment. For me that means finding a way to conserve my “crisp” vision for necessary tasks and learn to sketch without crisp vision when that’s all that’s left. It also means learning to adapt to sketching when sketching brings on headaches; or doesn’t work in the fluid way it has my entire life. 

My students and readers know that “fun factor” in art making is important to me.

The reality is that post-surgery sketching has often not been fun. But I’ve kept sketching for a host of reasons. Most important was I didn’t want to waste time moping and hoping my vision would snap into place. I didn’t want to lose time trying to reconnect my brain, while waiting for the hope of a fix that might never come. (Update, it won’t come, this is permanent.)

I won’t be spending time writing or talking about headaches on the new site. I’ve made the conscious choice to spend my time sketching and drawing. I want to note changes in process as I adapt, and suggest approaches for you, whatever type of vision you have. 

The one of the posts published each month I’ll be looking the intentions I set, and the way I do or don’t follow through or some other aspect of process.

There won’t be whining. Roz Wound Up readers and students know that I don’t value whining or making excuses.  

Instead I will be sharing my discussions with my Editing Eye. I’ll be looking at specifics that can be changed, and discussing why I did or didn’t change them—that’s the type of dialog I believe we must all have internally every day of our creative lives. I believe that there are benefits in viewing someone having that discussion. Benefits that you can absorb and take back to make your own art practice healthier.

Please note that typically I will show my reference in the video along side my work area as shown in the sample videos now open to the public. However there are situations in which I will not be able to do this. I may be working from life or if I’m using a Sktchy App photo I may not have been given permission to show the photo reference in an instructional video or even been able to contact the muse (many leave the app and their photos behind). 

Initially many of the videos will be sketches and paintings from photo references. Because of the complications with my eyes I can’t easily venture into some lighting situations. Additionally I’m doing these videos on my own without camera help—these essentially are private videos I made for my own understanding to watch myself paint with the new eyes and see where I could tweak my process. 

While I would prefer to sketch from life, 2019 has been a year where the choice has been sketch from photo reference or don’t sketch at all. I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel.

Whatever I’m sketching I’ll make every effort to include some sort of photo of the subject whenever possible so you have at least a rough idea of what I’m looking at.

If I am sketching from Sktchy and I can’t contact a muse or they want to be anonymous there will be no reference photo shown in the video but you can go to my public Sktchy profile and click on my sketch there and view the reference photo. (Note: You have to have an iPhone to access the Sktchy App; they don’t have plans to expand this.)

I believe that the videos I’m going to show you will have interest and educational content whether or not you are able to see a drawing reference. However if this bothers you please don’t subscribe. This is really out of my control. Sometimes I’ll be sketching and not have someone else to take a photo before a subject departs, or a Sktchy muse I want to draw will have left Sktchy and is not traceable for permission to use in a video. 

Most of the videos I post on Roz Interim will show a reference, but I wanted you to be fully informed.

I believe that all the videos I’ve produced for Roz Interim will allow me to share something about my process, be useful from a learning perspective, and will be entertaining (as much as watching paint dry can be entertaining).

If you want to know more about why I started making these sketch videos and how I decided to shown them on Patreon you can read the page I created about my Patreon site here.

Patreon is an Experiment

Setting up the subscription blog is an experiment.

In a way it grew out of my desire to still keep making videos without the massive filming and editing time commitments which now exert great cost on my vision. Students in my online video classes know how many hours I spent putting those together with great depth and detail. I simply wasn’t ready to give up video editing just as I wasn’t ready to give up sketching.

I have no idea who might be interested in these process videos.

After the side effects of surgery were known several students stated they would welcome an opportunity to stay in touch with me, see what I’m doing, and of course, hear me go off on a tangent when I’m explaining something. These process videos seem a likely way to do that.

What I have learned, since making the first video in June of this year, is that they did help me realize some things about my process; they helped me focus my ability on adapting to my new eyes, and they helped me work through the grief over the loss of something I appreciated so much and built my life upon (my vision). I am still working through the sadness but I see the changes to my eyes as new challenges to build my life around rather than a reason to simply abandon something so key to my life. (Sketching.)

In fact one of the most wonderful things that happened to me in 2019 was the reminder that my creativity, like everyone’s, can take many forms; many of which I’ll be trying out in the coming years.

It was also clear this year, as usual, that I’m bossy, opinionated, and I have to get something down on paper or my head will explode. Dick has been cleaning up those messes as I’ve worked my way forward. My previous way of cleaning up these messes myself was with sketching. That’s the challenge going forward—to find something that works that well.

I’ll be writing about my journaling process and how it changed in the past year, right here on RozWoundUp as it is encompassed in “my many enthusiasms.” So even if a subscription blog isn’t of interest to you, I hope you’ll still stop by here now and then to see what’s going on. I have some fun posts coming up in the next couple weeks and beyond.

The following video was made for my Patreon site to explain the tier levels and reasoning behind this site.