How I made Art Camp
A story in eight parts.
I. Inspiration
The idea for Art Camp came one beautiful spring day in 2012 when I was out shopping with my then-girlfriend. I had a notebook in my pocket, coffee in my hand, and time to let my mind wander.
I recalled how many of my classmates back in art school would go on summer break and do absolutely nothing. No art, no studies, no practice. Three months of not making progress towards being better artists. Considering there’s hardly enough time in art school to become a good artist, wasting time like that was terrible. They need every precious hour if they’re going to learn enough about art during school to do well when they graduate.
So I had this idea of an online boot camp where students could spend the weeks between school years studying and improving their fundamentals. The original name was Art Boot Camp. Later I scrapped the “Boot” and turned it into “Noah’s Art Camp.”
I looked at the calendar and saw that 12 weeks seemed like a decent length for the course that would fit comfortably between a lot of school years, so I outlined 12 weeks worth of material. I took a nice template from html5up and put together a signup page. It was a description of how the course would run and a Paypal button at the bottom. The Paypal button wasn’t integrated into anything. I had to manually copy & paste the info from each Paypal transaction into a private Mailchimp list. I thought it was going to be a small group so there was no need to bother setting up a seamless registration process.
I did the math and figured if I got about 25 people to sign up, I’d be happy. 25 people x the $225 price sticker would be a bit over $5k and would be a good hourly wage for the hours I was going to spend recording demos.
II. Perspiration
I “launched” the course by sending a small mailing to the people who had purchased my lecture on freelancing for artists. I offered a discount on Art Camp and the first opportunity to join in on the new thing I was making.
I didn’t want to tell anyone else on social media or anything so that when hardly anyone signed up for the course and I knew it was an abysmal failure, I could return everyone’s money, shut down the site, and pretend like it had never happened.
I still remember sending the email and… waiting. It’s a tense moment after you send out an announcement like that and wait for a first signup.
And then it came. Someone signed up! I couldn’t believe it. They trusted that I could make a great course and teach them some stuff about art. It was a wonderful feeling and a day I won’t easily forget.
The signups kept rolling in. By the end of the day about 25 people had signed up. I had hit my total goal for the course in just a day.
I knew I had something good on my hands here.
Now I just had to not screw it up.
III. Creation
About a month later, the first day of the course finally rolled around. The first two hour demo video was ready to go, the emails were all set, and I had made it. Hundreds of people had signed up for this little idea I had.
The first demo was for master studies and is now available for free on Youtube. It’s probably the most useful exercise for artists and I knew I wanted to open with an ace. It was great. People loved the material and they loved the assignments. I witnessed hundreds of students churning out a total of thousands and thousands of studies. To know that I had a hand in encouraging so much artistic study was both inspiring and humbling. This was why I did all of this. This is why Art Camp existed: To get people to study art and show them how to do it. To serve as a kick in the pants for anyone needing motivation and guidance for those who didn’t know where to go.
I wish I could say that I recorded all of the content months in advance and everything was smooth and easy but that’s not the case at all. My tendency for procrastination got the best of me and I was constantly pushing deadlines till the last minute. But each week I managed to create a demo and get it online for the students. Despite difficulties ranging from crashing computers to a cheating girlfriend, I always managed. Life doesn’t tend to sit idly by, even when we’d like it to the most.
It was quite the summer.
I did plenty of things wrong. I should have automated more of it (yes, manual data entry is slow), I should have been more active in the community, I should have offered more ways to interact beyond the Facebook group, I should have done a lot of things. But even with my mistakes I’m still incredibly proud of what I did. Because I figured out a system where I could teach a lot of people at once and it worked. They learned.
I’ll note now that I have always had (and always will have) a 100%, no-questions-asked, guaranteed refund on any of my online materials. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back. If you loved it and want your money back for whatever reason? Cool, I’ll do that too. The last thing I ever wanted in life was a bitter taste in my mouth knowing that there were people out there who felt that they had been suckered out of their money by me. If I’m going to take someone’s money, I want to know they’re getting plenty of value out of it. To this day, total returns for my courses has averaged about 2–3%. I’m pretty proud of that number.
After that summer was over (and I took a much-needed breather), I turned to the winter. I realized a bunch of people were disappointed that they had missed out on the summer course. So I decided to run through the same material again during the winter break. It was free for anyone who had already purchased the course (because I hate “buying” something and not having access to it forever).
IV. Augmentation
In 2014 I found myself in Australia with an infinitely-better, beautiful, amazing, supportive, artistic, and otherwise just awesome girlfriend. As I sipped another delicious flat white in yet another artsy cafe in Melbourne, I pondered where Noah’s Art Camp should go. Should I run another course? Should I run the same course again? Should I bring in other people to teach? Where should I take it?
I decided there were more fundamentals I wanted to cover. When I had outlined the original course I had ended up with a lot more lessons than the 12 weeks would allow me. So I decided to use Art Camp 2 as a chance to explore all of those additional, and often more experimental, lessons.
I knew that having other people involved in some way would be a good thing because they bring totally new things to the table. So I enlisted the help of a few of my artist friends to help with the feedback side of things. I paid them to take a few hours out of each of their weeks to hop on the forums and give the students critique. Having had a diversity of teachers had always been a benefit to me and I wanted to afford the same opportunity to my students. I think I’m a pretty decent teacher but I wanted to expose them to different (and perhaps opposing) opinions on art making.
With these changes, came a new look. I had never bothered with a logo or branding in the past. I decided to scrap my name from “Noah’s Art Camp” and just make it “Art Camp.” It had a nice ring to it and it made the whole thing less about me. It was about art, not Noah. I had the aforementioned awesome-girlfriend help me out by designing a cool logo for us. I also negotiated with the then-owner of artcamp.com to purchase the domain for around $3000. I wasn’t sure how far Art Camp would grow in the future, but thought this was the appropriate time to invest in a more professional domain.
One of the major changes, and perhaps mistakes, of Art Camp 2 was the forum system.
Art Camp 1 had been run entirely through a Facebook group and weekly mailings going to everyone’s inbox. It had problems. Some people wouldn’t get the emails. And then some people had the trouble of having their work seen on a Facebook group of that size. Facebook groups tend to do a poor job of giving equal visibility once you get to scale. They focus on the popular at the detriment of the less so. And in art education, popularity should never be the focus. You don’t need a few hot-shot art students getting undue attention while others suffer from lack of any feedback.
Furthermore, it was a logistical nightmare to manually approve each signup to the group. Too many people using different names than their Paypal transactions and causing just more busy work for myself.
So for Art Camp 2 I wanted to organize things. I opted for a traditional forum system. They would be able to access a selection of different forums to post their assignments and have discussions. In theory it would work excellently.
Trouble is, it never became as active as the Facebook group had been the year before. And I should have seen that coming. I should have known that having the group in front of their faces every day on a site they’re all using anyway would encourage more active interaction. So while the content was well organized and nicely integrated, I feel like one of Art Camp 1’s strong points was lost this time around.
But the course went forward. Signups were similar to Art Camp 1. Another success on my hands.
Demos were more difficult than the first time around because I was pushing further outside of my own comfort zone. On top of that, I had to contend with an Australian internet connection. A connection so bad that at one point it would have been faster for me to fly to LAX, hop on the free wifi there, and upload a video than to do so in the comfort of my own apartment.
Really. It was awful.
To make matters more perfectly annoying, my main computer, a Cintiq Companion, completely died after completing one week’s demo video. Dead to the point of not charging, unable to turn on, and no accessible hard drive to even recover my files from. Oh and actually that was the second time I had tried to record the exact same demo. You can imagine my reaction.
The next day I borrowed my girlfriend’s old desktop, went to buy a cheap little Intuos, and set to recording the demo anew. Constant problems is often the name of the game, but you just have to keep working through them regardless. The show must go on, if you will. The wonderful and terrible thing about having hundreds of people counting on you is that you don’t have much of a choice whether or not you’re going to get your work done. You’re going to do it.
You have to.
V. Transformation
During the winter of 2015 I met a man in a small hotel bar in central Bucharest who would be the next step for Art Camp.
His name is Titus Lunter and we hit it off immediately.
We talked a lot while we were there in Romania, later online, and still more when he came to visit in New Zealand. I found an artist who I respected, who had a great desire to teach but had never tried it, and a genuinely nice, awesome person. I wanted him to teach the next Art Camp. So did he.
He would run the course in much the same format that I had been using and I’d help to promote the course and use the reputation I had been building for a couple years to help him get more signups.
It went great.
He ran an excellent course, had a good turn out, and left some very inspired artists at the end of it. I couldn’t be happier.
I was thrilled because I had the opportunity to help a friend and fellow artist make some money. I have always had issues with companies that take too much of a creative’s money to simply use their platform. So with Titus I had him keep 90% of what came in from all of the signups. The 10% I kept was to handle paypal fees, pay for server costs, and for my time for any of the customer support I had to deal with.
I loved the break from teaching things myself. It was awesome going through 2015 without the huge pressure to create so much content for so many people. It also gave me free time to reorganize the content and host it through Vimeo, begin offering it all on Gumroad, and even have English captions made for the entire course so it can be more accessible.
VI. Consideration
Here I am, back in Australia, and faced with the prospect of another year and an infinite number of directions to take Art Camp. Do I continue teaching new courses full of new material? Do I refine what I already have? Do I bring in a team of new instructors to teach their own Art Camp? Do I run an in-person Art Camp event? Do I do something entirely different?
Allow me to sip my coffee thoughtfully.
Well any of those are a possibility. Maybe all of them.
For this year, though, I plan to run a new course. It’s going to be beyond the fundamentals. It’s going to cover more specialized skills, more narrowed in training. Signups should open up in the coming months, with the course beginning sometime in May.
Titus’s fantastic course on Environment Concept Design will also be repeated, for anyone who missed out on it the first time around.
Taking off of teaching in 2015 has left me pretty pumped and full of ideas for teaching in 2016. It’s going to be great.
VII. Adulation
I would like to publicly thank each and every one of the students who have signed up for my courses. I cannot believe how patient, understanding, and supportive you have all been during all of this time. Y’all are the reason I get to do what I do. And I can only hope that you’re benefiting from the material I continue to put out there. Please keep sharing your studies and progress with me. It inspires me to see the effort you all put into your work.
I might be the “teacher,” but you have all taught me so much in return. You’ve taught me how to communicate, how to paint better, and how to work harder. In my efforts to make you all better artists, you’ve made me a better artist.
So, thanks.
VIII. Summation
I’m lucky.
Sure, I’ve worked hard on this and had a pretty good idea to start with. But I’m not going to sit here and pretend like luck didn’t play a part in all of this. I hit the right note at the right time and somehow that resonated with folks. Far too many people attribute to genius what could much more fairly be credited to a healthy dose of luck.
But luck’s a funny thing. You can sit around all day waiting to get lucky and it’s never going to happen. But if you do something, you just might get lucky.
And that’s really the only thing that I can say with certainty that worked: I did something.
I made a thing and asked people to buy it. A bunch of people bought it and liked it and now I’m here today. That’s the story of Art Camp so far.
I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
