Every Piece of Art I Made During Summer Creative Retreat

The good, the bad, and the (ugly) cute.

Note: this post is long and contains a lot of images of art so it’s best viewed on the Substack app or website and may be cut off in your inbox!

Hello, friends!

I recently wrapped up participating in Summer Creative Retreat and made a crazy amount of art during all the workshops. In this post, I’m opening up the pages of my sketchbook (and iPad) to show you everything I made (even the not great stuff).

What is Summer Creative Retreat?

It’s a week long festival of workshops hosted by The Pigeon Letters aka Peggy Dean. The workshops are taught by a variety of artists all around the world on an even wider variety of topics.

There were workshops on watercolor, lettering, crocheting, collage, making procreate stickers, drawing realistic animals, drawing self portraits, etc.

It was hosted live (and free!) from Aug 1-6. You can read more about it here. It will be hosted again on the same dates next year, so if you missed this year you can save the date for next year!

Allllllll of the Art Things

Okay, let’s dive right into to all the things I made (spoiler alert, it was a LOT). I’m sharing everything I made during the workshops I took, regardless of how it turned out. Some workshops were in my wheelhouse, others were way outside my comfort zone, but they were all fun!

First up here are the projects I made from 3 different workshops taught by Peggy Dean:

Botanical line drawing, witchy vase taxonomy, and cute cottages

Plus this one which cropped really terribly in the gallery so it’s getting it’s own view, also taught by Peggy Dean:

A spread of some tasty treats from my camera roll (workshop by Erika Lamar):

Mindful botanical sketches, plus some lines for practicing using watercolors (workshop by Shelley Skail):

One color florals which made me think “oh hey, maybe I can do this watercolor thing after all” (workshop by Nikki Hess):

Loose floral doodles (workshop by Clarice G):

Cute mixed media birds sharing a page with a color pencil scene (birds workshop by Natalie Lundeen and color pencil workshop by Julia Henze):

And then because this is getting super long here are the rest of the sketchbook pages in a gallery. Here we have a green on green mixed media forest scene (workshop by Kristina Hultkrantz), a “travel” watercolor painting of a mountain scene (workshop by Kolbie Blume). The final two images were from Procreate workshops that I sketched traditionally because my iPad needed a nap (workshops by Gabrielle Brickey and Kawaiitash):

Some more sketchbook pages from the retreat!

In addition to sketchbook work I also made some digital art, including this set of stickers for Instagram (workshop by Laura Jones):

This portrait of a made up person (workshop by bydoriana.studio, human intelligence badge inspired by

Beth Spencer

) :

And this gif of dancing plants (workshop by Genna Blackburn):

Phew! And that’s everything…I think! I’m ready for a nap now 😅

What a fun week. I feel exhausted a bit, yes, but also inspired, motivated, and accomplished!

There are several projects I want to expand on, like making a whole set of stickers for Instagram and turning these plants into a pattern or maybe animated stickers perhaps? Plus after drawing the tufted titmouse I’ve decide my next art series is going to be called Animals with Attitude 😂

I know that was a lot, so thanks for sticking with me. Just one last thing before we go…

Upcoming Events

Remember the Doggust drawing session I wanted to host? Well I’m happy to announce that I’ll be hosting that with

Libby Brewster

on August 20th! I’ll be posting more information about it next week, but here’s a sneak peek:

Libby and I both have our birthdays in August so we’re going to celebrate with this (free!) drawing session! The theme will be Party Pups, so bring your party hats and your confetti and get ready to draw some birthday party dogs!

The fun doesn’t stop there though, the following Tuesday, August 27th at 2pm EST/7pm BST will be our next session of our Digital Drawing co-working call (also free and also co-hosted with Libby!).

Sign up here!