I hope all of you had a Happy New Year! Here's hoping 2018 will be better than the last.

To start the new year, I decided to take two courses that I've been looking forward to for some time now. The first is the Make Art That Sells Assignment Bootcamp Plus . This is a course offered by Make Art That Sells, which is an international collaboration between an art agency, Lilla Rogers Studio, and an online education provider, Do What You Love. The course is a structured five month program of monthly assignments to help us build a strong body of work and Lilla's expert review on how to make our portfolio attract the jobs we want. I decided to take this course, in part, because one of my friends has been a featured, represented artist of Lilla Roger's Studio - Anne Bentley. She is an amazing artist and has been getting great illustration jobs since she became a finalist in the MATS Global Talent Search and has been represented by Lilla Roger's Studio.

The other course I decided to take this year is Liz Steel's Sketching Now Watercolour course. Liz is one of the two urban sketchers who have attended all of the Urban Sketchers Symposiums - and a really lovely person who I've taken a class with at the last Symposium in Chicago and sketched with in San Francisco this summer. Liz has an architecture background and loves sketching buildings. But, I really love how she incorporates watercolor into her pen and ink sketches. So, I was happy to take this course with her when it was announced.

Sketching Now Watercolour is a six week course that focuses on providing students with a solid understanding of how pigment suspended in water behaves and a few specific strategies for using watercolour in a quick and spontaneous way will enable you to paint with more confidence out on location

Stay tuned to my blog for specific posts on each course as they continue. I can't wait!