New year, completely new direction

Big changes at Dragonfly Spirit Studio and The Creative Pond

2023 was a great year for Dragonfly Spirit Studio!

• 19 new in-depth watercolor how-to lessons, which were provided to

• 1000+ newsletter subscribers

• 33,000+ website visitors

• 50,000+ YouTube subscribers and 220,000+ views (lots of nonsubscibers watch)

This is the best pace of production I’ve ever achieved. I worked hard in 2022 and 2023 to make my workflow as efficient as possible, and to increase interaction with you. I produced more lessons overall, and more in-depth lessons on planning, developing your watercolor intuition and finding your own style and voice. Topics that are hard to find in other self-study resources.

Moving the newsletter to Substack allowed me to finally be able to interact with some of you again in comments and email. It’s been wonderful for helping me better understand your watercolor questions and challenges, and for making me feel like part of a creative community again.

So everything’s great!

Except. This big push in 2023—together with a careful look back at my business over the past several years—made it crystal clear:

It’s time for me to stop making free online self-study lessons and courses.

The past 4 years have taken a toll on my business’s finances, but an even bigger toll on my body and spirit. I’m not ready to retire, and I’m not burned out on teaching, but it’s time for some major changes in how I teach if I want to preserve my health and well-being.

The short version is that I need to go back to teaching fewer people, in a more interactive way, instead of trying to provide self-study content for thousands. In other words, back to what I was doing before the pandemic.

In a moment, I’ll explain more about why I’ve made this decision and what my future plans might look like (for those who are interested).

But first, the TL;DR version about how this will affect you:

I’m stepping away entirely from making online self-study lessons and courses.

If I do make online self-study material in the future, it will probably only be the way I did before the pandemic: as supplements or review for students in my classes.

Paid subscriptions to the newsletter will be ended.

The newletter is no longer a watercolor-lesson-delivery-system.

It’s going back to being an actual studio newsletter. You know, with news: things like what I’m working on and thinking about in the studio, pictures of new art, probably some process videos of work in progress, announcements of upcoming Zoom classes or open studio sessions.

Paid subscribers, please read: Auto-renew has been cancelled for all paid subscriptions. No further subscriptions payments should be billed. Monthly subscribers: Please let me know if you get billed in February, so I can fix it with Substack. Annual subscribers, if you would like a refund of the unused portion of your subscription, please let me know. (I need to work with Substack support to cancel payments without cancelling subscriptions, and to issue individual refunds, so it might take a little while to sort out this part. Please bear with me.)

If your only interest is/was free online self-study materials, you should probably unsubscribe from this list.

Any future teaching from me will be interactive, via Zoom or in person. (And, no, I won’t have an option for you to just buy recordings of the class sessions.)

I completely understand that many of you have busy or unpredictable schedules and can’t do Zoom classes. So, if this change means it’s time for us to part ways, please don’t hesitate to unclutter your inbox and my subscriber list by unsubscribing from the newsletter. I won’t take it personally; just as I hope you will understand that I’m not making this change to purposely disappoint you, but rather to return to a business model that was much healthier for me.

I hope the love and care I’ve poured into these self-study lessons over the past 4 years has given you great value. (And keep in mind, all that value is still sitting on the website for you to explore.) I am honored that so many of you let me share a bit of your watercolor journey.

Whether you remain a subscriber or not, I’m always happy to hear from you. Once a Dragonfly, always a Dragonfly. Don’t hesitate to email me and share what you’re up to, if you like. (Pics of your artwork or news of personal art-triumphs are always a delight!—hint, hint.)

Existing free content will remain accessible in its current form for now.

The three free courses and the nearly 200 stand-alone free lessons on the website, all the posts here on Substack, and my videos on YouTube will remain freely accessible for now, although the website content will undoubtedly evolve, as it always has. This might change someday, but for now, I’m not planning any changes.

Why did I make this decision?

I’m not burned out on teaching, and I’m absolutely not burned out on interacting with you. But I also never really wanted to serve thousands of people in a distant, impersonal way. Teaching, for me, is all about the student-teacher, or artist-to-artist, relationship.

I made a deliberate choice, many years ago, not to get caught up in the YouTube/social media game of numbers. Some people love being on camera, interacting on social media, and bringing their fun and expertise to thousands. I teach best when I’m working with people one-on-one or in small groups, preferably over a longer time period. I like to really get to know my students and tailor my teaching to each person’s needs and goals. I carefully crafted my business model to emphasize that strength.

For the past 4 years, I’ve tried to accommodate the extraordinary conditions of the pandemic by shifting my teaching work primarily to making self-study content. But making self-study lessons and courses is not a healthy business model for me. It’s time to go back to my earlier business structure

The work involved in making online self-study materials is extremely sedentary.

When I’m teaching in-person classes, I’m pretty active: packing and hauling supplies, setting up tables, cleaning up messes, walking around the room helping people. I can paint class demonstrations the way I normally paint: standing up, using my whole body to move the brush, walking around to look at the painting from different distances.

The only time I might be sitting down is to type up a handout, or do a demo in a setting where there’s an overhead camera instead of a mirror. Even then, in class, I demo for five minutes or so, and then I’m up moving around the classroom again.

Making online self-study lessons looks like this: writing articles and scripts, recording demonstrations (sitting, because the overhead camera is exactly where my head needs to be if I stand up), making graphics and titles, editing video, adding voiceovers, uploading videos to YouTube and Vimeo, entering video information and settings, creating the webpages and Substack posts that deliver the lessons to you, maintaining and updating the website, writing email replies to users who need help with a video that won’t play for them, how to download a handout, or just general help with navigating a website.

It takes 20-60 hours to do all these tasks for a single online lesson. That’s a LOT of sitting (or standing still). I have sit-stand desks and ergonomic-everything, but my body can’t tolerate this much inactivity. Probably no one’s can.

Making self-study lessons and courses involves almost no interaction with students.

There’s no feedback on whether a lesson is working for students.

With self-study lessons I don’t get any feedback from watching what students are doing and I rarely hear any of their questions. This makes it extremely difficult to create clear, understandable lessons. I succeed to the extent I do only because I have previous in-person experience to draw upon.

I’m not growing as a teacher.

Relying on past teaching experience is okay for short periods, but eventually memories fade. More critically, I’m not hearing new questions or getting new insights by watching students work. I learn to be a better teacher from my students. You challenge me to consider problems I haven’t encountered in my own work, and to keep seeking new ways to explain things that will connect with people who learn differently from me.

There’s nothing to motivate me.

I love sharing the creative journey with you, and sharing anything I know that might make help you reach your creative goals faster. I love learning more about you and the art you are striving to make. Teaching is fulfilling and rewarding, but it also takes a lot of energy. In person, we both contribute energy to the learning process, and we generate excitement and enthusiasm together.

What gets me fired up to do the challenging work of teaching is

• the joy of sharing those aha! moments

• the satisfaction of seeing a student reach a creative goal and knowing I had a little part in helping them get there

• celebrating students’ successes and “firsts” like first acceptance in a juried show or delivering their first painting commission or finally getting that sunset wash just right.

Making self-study materials provide almost none of this feedback or motivation. I spend hours talking with . . . a silent, unresponsive little green light. This is soul-killing work for me.

It’s expensive to serve a large audience.

It costs a lot more to have all the functions and services to support an e-learning website with thousands of users than it does to just have a website to showcase my own work and blog, and offer a few Zoom classes.

In 2023, the added costs to serve so many people were around $1600 in out-of-pocket expenses, plus an average of about 5 hours a week of work to maintain the site and provide customer support for people who need help with new-to-them tech tasks, like downloading a handout or learning how to use that little magnifying glass to search the website for a lesson.

For a website serving thousands of users to be self-sustaining, it would need to generate enough passive income to cover these costs. Voluntary donations and YouTube revenue are not sufficient. In 2023, of the 1000+ newsletter subscribers, 33,000+ website users and 50,000+ YouTube subscribers, only 45 people were willing to voluntarily contribute financially to support this work, 13 through tip jar donations and 32 with voluntary paid newsletter subscriptions. YouTube ad revenue for my channel in 2023 was $625.

Simply growing the audience even bigger to get more donations is not a solution. More website users means even more costs.

There are many other ways besides voluntary donations that the website might become self-supporting, but this is an issue I’m purposely setting aside for a while so I can come back with more clarity. For now, it feels manageable to continue maintaining and paying for the website myself, if I’m not doing all the other sedentary work.

So what’s next?

Some more thinking, for me.

I’d hoped to figure out at a new structure over the holidays and be ready to announce the new plan in this newsletter, but I need to do some more planning, experimenting and testing.

This major shift in my business feels absolutely right and absolutely necessary, but it still wasn’t easy to face the fact that I was going to be disappointing so many of you, and I’ve written and deleted and rewritten a novel’s worth of words trying to find the best way to explain.

So for the next couple of weeks, I’m going to just take some time to let my emotions settle and my head clear. Then I’ll be better able to plan the next steps.

But here are some of the things I’m thinking about trying:

• shorter, less-expensive one-on-one help sessions that you can book online as needed

• Zoom classes and workshops (maybe we’ve gotten over our collective Zoom fatigue?)

• Zoom open studio — a designated time or times each week when you could drop in and get help with paintings you’re working on, skills you want to develop, or just a painting prompt/demo to help you establish a consistent painting routine.

• an occasional blog post about what I’m working on in my own art, with pics or maybe an occasional process video of work in progress

• a seasonal rhythm to my offerings — I plan to travel more again in my van, so I’m thinking Zoom classes when I’m home, and opportunities for you to schedule an in-person mini-workshop or coaching session for you and some of your friends as I pass through your area when I’m traveling

If some these ideas interest you, stay tuned. It would be enormously helpful if those of you who are interested could share some of your creative goals and challenges. Which of these options would help you most? What topics would you most like to see a class on, etc.? What is your time zone and when are the best times for you to be able to attend a Zoom class or open studio?

Hit reply and let me know, or leave a comment. (Yes, I did just put a poll in a newsletter asking about this, but only about 20 people out of 1000 responded and no one suggested a topic of interest or a challenge they wanted help with, so it didn’t really tell me anything.)

If only self-study works for you, I’ll say farewell and thanks for letting me be part of your journey for the past few years. I hope our time together has left you at least a little better prepared to take on your next creative challenge.

I wish all of you a healthy, happy and creatively fulfilling 2024.

Happy painting and Happy New Year, Dragonflies!

Lynne