Welcome To The Creative Spark Newsletter!
A year round companion for exploring and cultivating your creative practice!
The Creative Spark Newsletter is designed to help encourage, inspire, and motivate you to create in the pages of your sketchbook all year round! Through carefully curated prompts, thoughtful ideas, a flexible & loose schedule, and gentle encouragement, we'll fuel our creative practice and see where our curiosity and interests take us. This will all happen via email so you can join from anywhere in the world at the time that works best for you! You don't have to sign up for another platform or be active on social media (unless you want to be :))
I am passionate about encouraging creativity and adding more of it into our lives in a way that's easy and fun! Welcome-- I am very excited to create together in the year ahead! Below are some more details about it.
THIS NEWSLETTER IS FOR:
- Anyone who has an interest in the arts and creating!
- Those of us who may be stuck in a creative rut
- Those of us who may create consistently and are open to new inspiration
- Beginners who have picked up their first sketchbook (or want to!) to seasoned hobbyists to creative professionals and everyone in between!
- Teens and adults
- Anyone who is scared of beginning or revisiting their creative journeys
- Everyone who finds joy in creating, working with our hands and minds, putting ideas onto paper, and is OK with getting a little messy sometimes!
YOU'LL RECEIVE:
- Emails with prompts, examples, and questions to help you interpret the prompts in your own way and spark ideas for your sketchbook.
- Check-in emails to keep you motivated and exercises to help get the creativity flowing
- PDFs you can download & print
- Examples from our community to keep you connected and inspired
- Access to our community photo gallery where your work will be featured and you can see what others are creating
- I'll also be going on this journey with you! You'll be able to email me to share your ideas and have a sound board or to work through prompts and brainstorm if you'd like.
- Forever access to all emails and prompts, organized in a library for you to easily revisit when needed.
- A few other little surprises :)
- The Creative Spark Newsletter is an extended version of The Summer Sketchbook Un-Slump with some updates. If you'd like to get an idea of what the CSN emails will look like, you can browse through past Un-Slump emails by clicking here.
WHAT SUPPLIES DO YOU NEED?
I love the idea of using what we have and looking at them in a new light. You don't need to buy new supplies for this (unless you want to) and if you do need to pick up a few things, there are very affordable options. You'll receive an email with recommendations of what to use and some of my favorite supplies but all you really need is:
- A surface to create on. I suggest using a sketchbook to keep everything in one place, it's easy to carry, and it's really fun to flip through when you're done! However you can also use scratch paper bound into a book, paper on a clipboard, a canvas, etc.
- Tools to make markings with such as pens, markers, paint brushes, and mediums such as acrylic paint, watercolor, inks, etc.
SCHEDULE
The schedule is based on the different levels and flow of energy we have throughout the year. We'll be mixing more intensive 5 week series with less intensive months in between to keep things sustainable while still gently encouraging a continuous flow of creativity. We will also have some scheduled breaks. The final schedule will be sent out in the welcome email in early January but will look something like this:
- Early Jan: Prep email to help us get ready
- Mid-Jan to Feb: 5 Week Creative Kickstart (1 prompt + 1 check-in email per week for 5 continuous weeks)
- March, April, May, June: 2 prompts + 2 check-in emails per month (1 email per week)
- July-Aug: 5 Week Summer Un-Slump (1 prompt + 1 check-in email per week for 5 continuous weeks)
- Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec: 2 prompts + 2 check-in emails per month
- Dec: Final wrap up email
SUPPORTING CREATIVITY IN OUR CLASSROOMS
5% of proceeds from each subscription will be used to help support arts education in a classroom through DonorsChoose.org. I will let you know all about the teacher and kids we are helping once the donation has been made!
TESTIMONIALS
The Creative Spark Newsletter is an extended version of The Summer Sketchbook Un-Slump with some updates. Here’s what creatives who joined in on the Un-Slump said about their experience:
“Olivia is lovely, thoughtful, inclusive, sensitive, creative, responsive and encouraging. There’s no pressure. There’s so many ideas to use as springboards/ portals to opening up one’s own creativity. I will, return to the prompts again and again. Olivia’s own explorations and daring are inspiring. The summer unslump is wonderful even if you’re not in an unslump. I loved participating.” - Ellen B.
“The SSUS Challenge was exactly what I needed this summer! The way Olivia shares each prompt left so much space for interpretation, where I felt so inspired by her emails and then inspired again seeing all the amazing pieces that the community created in the gallery. And the ideas that she shared inspired me to think outside of my normal way of painting and to incorporating a lot of different, unique elements. I also really appreciated the way it was set up, with so much flexibility for everyone—some weeks I did 7 pages in my sketchbook others only one, some weeks I worked on it every day others only a few days, and it was completely up to me if I wanted to share on social – there was no pressure and I still felt like part of a community with the way she structured the emails and gallery.” - Melissa M.