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Hello friends, I hope the season is treating you well. You might remember that a few weeks ago I shared the launch of my latest class: Loose Watercolor Painting for Self-Care: The Art of Mindful Mark-Making.
Well, I wanted to pop in with a lovely little update because this class has been on quite the journey.
Shortly after I published the class, and while I was on a short break, I received the amazing news that it had been given a Skillshare Staff Pick. Staff Picks are selected by the editorial team at Skillshare as an enduring badge of quality, so being given one is a huge honour.
Then, a few week’s later, came another wonderful surprise: my class won a Grand Prize in the Skillshare Top-Teacher Teach Challenge. I was gobsmacked. The “Top Teacher” ranks in Skillshare are filled with the teachers whose classes I took and still take! To win any sort of teaching prize in that category really does blow my mind, (and, no, before you say it, I don’t think that’s just imposter syndrome talking… (okay, maybe a little bit)).
Not long after that, the class was featured on Skillshare’s Creativity and Inspiration homepage (below).
And now… the class has been chosen as the Editors’ Choice in The Path, Skillshare’s official newsletter 🤯. I don’t even know where to begin with that.
The Path team wrote better about my class than I can myself, so I’ll share what they said:
This beautifully gentle class from Shelley Skail teaches you how to use loose, flowy watercolor as a restorative form of “mindful mark‑making”. Instead of striving for precision, you learn to let go, embrace the unexpected, and allow the paint to move freely – making every brushstroke a moment of calm. More than art, it’s a way to refill your emotional tank.
I can’t tell you how delighted I am. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you might want to – I mean, Skillshare thinks it’s pretty good, and who am I to argue with Skillshare?
And for an extra bit of background, this class is the ‘big sister’ to both my Mini-Mindful Watercolour leaves class (Mini-Mindful Watercolor: The Art of Gestural Brushstroke Technique) and my Mini-Mindful Composition (Mini-Mindful Art Practice: Quick Guide to Intuitive Composition) class.
When I was planning them all out last year (!) I envisaged them as a mini-series:
The Mini-Mindful Watercolor class (#1) leads you into the Loose Watercolor Painting for Self-Care class (#2), which then takes you into the Mini-Mindful Composition class (#3). Each class develops the ideas introduced in the previous class while still all working as stand-alone classes.
I had planned to publish them in that order too, but life threw me some curveballs (you might remember me talking about a storm tearing off my roof…). Well, that whole situation meant I didn’t have the time to edit my longer class until recently so I edited and published my third class (the Mini-Mindful Composition one) second.
Happily now all three of them are out and I can structure them into the little series they were always meant to be, for you to enjoy and learn from in the order that I originally intended.
I hope you do enjoy this series and find it helpful.
