Creative Sabbatical Summer Break
I am currently taking time to (a) pursue my creative interests, specifically by taking 6 weeks of art classes at 3 schools, and (b) give my body and brain a chance to rest — because work, life, travel, health all demand a lot of energy. Also, I love learning and making art, and I’ve wanted to take more structured studio classes for a while.
So I decided to give myself the gift of a creative sabbatical. It happened to work out over a summer (particularly because that’s when art schools tend to offer weeklong courses), and I miss the academic calendar with built-in breaks that provide a collective reprieve from the stress of scheduled life.
Basically, I created my own DIY adult summer camp!
My Creative Sabbatical Summer Break
June 10 - 14: Graphic Memoir class, Center for Cartoon Studies, Vermont
June 19 - 27: London
June 28: Last day of full-time work until Labor Day
July 1 - 21: Glasgow School of Art, Scotland
Week 1: Introduction to Drawing & Painting
Week 2: Portfolio Prep
Week 3: Fiction and Picture Book Illustration
July 22 - 29: visiting family in Miami
July 29 - August 9: School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Week 1: Exploring Monoprint
Week 2: Painting and Drawing
August 10: back to family in Miami
Rest, recap, and keep creating!
If you’re curious to learn more, keep scrolling or jump ahead:
Why these classes & schools?
As a primarily self-taught artist, I really just wanted to take in-person classes in studios with teachers so I could learn best practices and more efficient ways to create art. So my requirements were, frankly, pretty broad. I chose the classes & locations based around places I had been thinking about taking classes for a while and what worked for my schedule.
Also, continuing education courses at colleges & universities are amazing! My first experience with them was taking a Creative Writing course and a Marketing class at the University of Texas Extension School (while living in Austin in 2011). Both were evening classes, but the marketing class was the exact same professor and curriculum as my sister had in the Business school as an undergraduate student at the time.
They’re generally pretty affordable and most schools offer them, so I’m always keeping an eye out for options that might work for wherever I am if I’ll be around long enough. It just hasn’t worked out until now. But I highly recommend you take a look at what’s available near you!
The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS)
I learned about The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) as a fan of their alum Lucy Knisley’s comics & graphic novels for a long time. I kept my eye on their classes & workshops page, and when I saw that the Graphic Memoir class conveniently fell right after my 15 year reunion at Williams College (which is ~2 hours away in western Mass), I decided it would be a great opportunity to take a class.
While my focus hasn’t thus far been on creating comics or graphic novels, a big reason I want to make art is to be able to add visual elements besides photos to the stories I want to share. And that kind of illustrated creative non-fiction is pretty similar to a graphic memoir, so it seemed like I’d learn some useful techniques & information.
The Glasgow School of Art
I first visited Glasgow in 2017, spending just 3 days there before I went on a (solo) road trip around Scotland. I went to and enjoyed the Kelvingrove Museum, and I must have made an important mental note about the history of art & art schools there because the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) lingered in the back of my mind ever since. I wasn’t even making art at the time (not until I first read The Artist’s Way in 2018 and picked up my first set of watercolors).
Glasgow is an old industrial city, with a history of shipbuilding and less tourism than Edinburgh (which I loved visiting). But somehow, I had the growing suspicion I’d be back, and at some point in the past ~5 years, I started to peek through the GSA website and noticed their Open Studio classes had weeklong options over the summer.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
I was familiar with the Art Institute from past visits to Chicago and from studying Art History. I didn’t know much about the school and had never really considered going anywhere for a full-time art studio program, but I had started poking around their website at some point and noticed they had continuing education classes during semesters and the weeklong summer intensives.
As I got more serious about taking classes, it just made sense to take advantage of the opportunity to experience & learn at one of the best art schools in the USA (and world). It’s pretty amazing that you can just… sign up.
What about work?
Since the fall of 2022, I’d been working as the Marketing Director for Guardian Revival, a non-profit in New York that provides programs to improve the mental health & well-being of military, veterans, first responders, and their families.
But now, I’m taking 2 months off!
While I have had a lot of variability in my workload as a freelancer since I quit my job in NYC in June 2014 — yes, exactly 10 years before this! — I haven’t committed to this much time off since I was… in high school? It can be scary to step away from work and income, but I decided it was worth the risk to invest in my mental health & creativity.
So for now, I’m just taking my art classes and occasionally doing small freelance projects & art commissions. (Email me if you have a project idea or inquiry!)
I’m also continuing my volunteer roles as a Board Member and the Content & Exhibition Committee Chair for the National Juneteenth Museum and as a member of the Executive Committee for the Society of Alumni for Williams College.
Support me by shopping!
Oh, yeah, I quite literally forgot to mention this and had to come back to update the post… my Alphabet book and some of my prints & artwork are available to purchase via my store (and you can get 20% off in August with the code BIRTHDAY). You can also buy the book on Amazon.
As I have made a lot of new work during my classes, I’m also adding some of those unique pieces to my online store here, plus the ability to buy certain custom commissions! And because I’ll be with a few boxes of books while in Miami this month, I can sign & personally dedicate copies if you buy a book and fill in the note to let me know what you want it to say before I ship it out!
Why now?
Like most things with me, answers are icebergs. You probably ask me a question expecting the response equivalent of what’s shown above the water — but I have so much more to share.
At some point in the past couple years, I started asking myself: “If you could make your dreams come true, what would you do?”
Honestly, part of the impetus of this was seeing my family and friends experience their dreams — dream weddings, homes, babies… and since those things aren’t in my life, I began to finally let myself consider my own dreams and if any of them were possibilities that I could actually achieve or experience.
So first, I spent time thinking about all possible dreams and occasionally discussing them in my Morning Pages journal (shoutout to my fellow Artist’s Way fans).
The truth is that some dreams are difficult for us to fulfill independently. I can’t, for example, completely control when (or even if) I will fall in love or have a happy, long-term relationship.
But I can (and did) fund, write, illustrate, and publish a book. I can plan, organize, and go travel. I can take art classes. I try to do the things that I can choose and make happen for myself. (Thats really all any of us can do, ever.)
Other important factors for this particular moment:
I feel more confident in my experience / resume and network because I’ve been working for 15 years, so I can hopefully assume that I will be able to find work / make money as needed, even after shifting my focus away from that for a while
I am always aware of the privilege and fortune I have with my family: that I always have a safe place to land when needed, which has always encouraged me to “Climb high, climb far, your goal the sky, your aim the star” (as my alma mater Williams College gates proclaim).
Many of my peers are married and having kids. Because I am not on that path for many reasons, I figure that I can risk at least equal amounts of time, money, and career cost as they are investing in maternity leave and parenthood.
After 2.5 years of working on my Alphabet book, I finished & published it, so I finally allowed myself to consider other major investments of my time for creative pursuits.
So with those things in mind, and a growing desire to explore the idea of “what if I did focus more on my art?”, I researched my options, organized the logistics, made commitments, and then… voila! Here I am (literally, finally finishing this blog post from my dorm room at the Art Institute of Chicago).
But really, how?
If you know me, you know I am all about research and planning, usually involving at least one spreadsheet.
All of this started as quiet thoughts in my head, with some peeks at websites as I began to brainstorm. Then came notes in journals, docs, emails, and whatsapp messages as I started developing ideas. But for me, things become plans via spreadsheets and events on my google calendar.
Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve tracked my expenses in spreadsheets (thanks, dad!). And when I left Brooklyn and started traveling in 2014, I started tracking where I’d be & when (and estimating how much it would cost me to get there & for housing). If I was visiting family or friends, then I’d estimate money for gifts & meals.
So back in January, I started mapping out my year — with status options starting with Estimate, then becoming Booked, and finally Actual (any producer / project managers reading this? lol). This helps me start to see what I have planned for sure: work trips, family / friend visits, etc. and the spaces between confirmed dates that I can plan for other trips.
(When I am abroad more / for longer stretches, I also use this to count the # of days I am in certain countries / regions for visa purposes, and if I’m trying to qualify for FEIE.)
4 months in my planning sheet
For this summer, I knew that I would be on campus at Williams in early May and then again in June for my reunion — which meant I’d be visiting western Massachusetts and likely flying in / out of either Boston or Albany. After my reunion (June 9), I didn’t have anything else on deck until September, so I was free to plan what I wanted.
In tandem with that, I was looking at the classes available at CCS, GSA, and SAIC (and only at those 3 schools, actually). Geographically, it made the most sense for me to go to CCS (in Vermont) at some point to or from Williams, and to go to GSA from the east coast via London.
Luckily, I found classes I was interested in at each school that fit my rough timeline well. And each school had suggested housing options that, while not inexpensive, were within reason. The total cost for 6 weeks of classes + housing = $6955, or about $1160 / week.
At ~30 hours a week of class, the tuition portion works out to be about $23 / hour of instruction, which seems reasonable to me since they’re all good schools and include studio space. (Art supplies are not included, which has cost several hundred dollars, but those are mine to use beyond the course).
Across the board, I’m paying an average of $70 / night for housing. Usually, I can optimize prices by booking a monthly rate. But that didn’t align with my plans, and I wanted to prioritize having an easily daily commute to each class (walking distance), so I went with the suggested student housing in each case. (Don’t be fooled by the Hotel Coolidge’s name; it was fine but not fancy!)
As you can see, the best deal was definitely GSA, especially for housing, but I’ll write more about each school / class and do more of a comparison later.
There was also some variability around when I had to pay for things — I booked CCS and SAIC in January so that was about $2500 upfront, but I didn’t have to pay for the Vermont housing until I arrived, so that $1120 was in June. I paid for GSA tuition and housing in March, which was around $2200. So it was already a kind of payment plan on its own, which also makes the financial planning easier to manage.
Because I am still in my “digital nomad” lifestyle, I don’t have other housing expenses (a major reason I do this lifestyle is because affording both a home and travel would be a financial challenge!), so my $3000 for housing for 6 weeks is more than normal rent / mortgage, but not necessarily more than someone might pay for rent + a big vacation. And I have to pay for food and other life expenses no matter where I am.
It’s all certainly less than having a baby! (Yes, I can justify almost any expense for myself knowing that it costs less than a child, which is appx $15-20K / year or around $200-400,000 over their lifetime to age 18.)
[Please note: I love kids and also 100% support people having children if they want them! Motherhood is just not for me, and I figure I might as well spend my money on things that matter to me, just like everyone who is having kids is spending money on that priority. It’s all just choices!]
In the interest of transparency, I will share that I am also allocating some of the funds my parents saved to help me pay for a wedding / house as neither of those appear to be on my horizon. I didn’t even know that my mom & stepdad had set aside anything until the past couple years (it likely hadn’t existed during my 20s, either). Last year, we three decided that I should use the money on whatever mattered most to me — like perhaps grad school or art classes.
I’m extremely grateful for both their financial support and the encouragement to use it on what I find most meaningful & impactful. Because while I could have afforded this all on my own, and it would’ve been worth the investment to me either way, it means a lot to me that they want to actively support me being happy, even if that’s a non-traditional lifestyle or creativity as a priority.
It’s an incredible gift to be loved and encouraged — and that is really just about being seen for who we truly are, accepted as we are, and cheered on as we pursue what we care about.
Once I had my dates, classes, and housing planned out, I found flights I could book with points on Air France (where I had leftover points and could transfer more to from my Chase card) for the biggest legs of my trip, costing me only a few hundred dollars in fees each:
Boston > Valencia
Madrid > Boston
New York > London
London > Miami
And then I figured out the necessary additional travel (rental cars, trains, short flights) and housing (an airbnb in London, visiting friends in Boston and New York, family in Miami).
After all the logistics were sorted, it was obvious that I needed and wanted more time for this than a standard vacation. So I scheduled a call with the COO at the non-profit to discuss my plans. She suggested I make use of their sabbatical policy to take a mix of paid and unpaid time off for July and August, which was easy to say yes to. (As a small team, it’s not easy to adjust to an absence. I really appreciated not only her immediate accommodation of my time but also her enthusiasm & encouragement for me and my creative pursuits. Thanks, Beth-Anne!)
Step by step, it all gets planned!
So… yeah, that’s essentially how I made this happen. Perhaps I don’t need to justify it all, though it often feels like I do since people seem to think I conjure my lifestyle from luck & magic, when it’s often less expensive and more logistically manageable than one might imagine.
More importantly, I share these details because I want people to know that it is achievable. You have an idea of something you really want to do? Is it something that can just be… bought and booked? Great! That’s literally all I did. None of this required a formal application or approval or anything special. Just me, making plans.
Take a look around my store, or keep reading:
