Learning how to say NO to potential business, clients, family, friends and even yourself will help you build a stronger and more successful creative business.

This course is a great companion to the Creative Process, Branding and Pricing courses in knowing who you are as a business owner, where you're going, and how to get there.

Saying no to potential work and clients seems like a backwards way to grow your business, we know! But in this course we'll get into how valuable it truly is and how to use it in your favor to better target your ideal clients, create more time in your work day, only get the work you want, and stay sane through all of it.

We will also explore the delicate and necessary art of "spin" aka the best ways to say no.

This course is a great companion to the Creative Process, Branding and Pricing courses in knowing who you are as a business owner, where you're going, and how to get there. 

Saying no to potential work and clients seems like a backwards way to grow your business, we know!  But in this course, we'll get into how valuable it truly is and how to use it in your favor to better target your ideal clients, create more time in your work day, only get the work you want, and stay sane through all of it.

We will also explore the delicate and necessary art of "spin" aka the best ways to say no.

We start every semester with 20% off for early registration!

Get 20% ALL courses, including class passes, from Friday, September 1 - Monday, September 4

Use coupon code 'EARLY20'

We only offer 20% off once a semester, so don't miss out!

Registration opens FRIDAY!!!!

Do you have awesome artwork or calligraphy skills on paper and no idea how to translate that to the computer? Digitizing your work is the first step in translating your beautiful artwork from paper to pixel.

With a digital copy of your work, you can use your hand-done artwork in layouts and designs, create prints, get products made, use it in your branding and online presence... the possibilities just open up! Digitizing can mean the difference between restarting a whole project because your client changed their colors or just doing a couple tweaks on Photoshop and reprinting. It can mean that you do the same amount of work and maximize your profit when you sell multiple prints of your piece. It can mean you create your own custom patterns made from your own artwork (awesome!) and proceed to use those patterns as wallpaper, fabric, envelope liners, you name it! 

We'll be starting at the beginning and walking you through scanning, editing and using calligraphy and artwork in your layouts and designs. This will be a beginner to intermediate course.

Although instruction will be using specific examples and methods in the Adobe Creative Suite (specifically, Photoshop), we do not require you to purchase Photoshop in order to take the course. The same principles could be applied to other photo-editing software, including free alternatives like GIMP. We do love Photoshop though (this isn't a sponsored post!) and it is often the industry standard, so we'd highly recommend taking advantage of the free trial from Adobe to see if Photoshop is for you. 

Who doesn't love botanicals?? Timeless and classy no matter the medium, we love incorporating botanical artwork into our work and our office space (have you seen our temporary wall mural?).

Traditionally, botanical sketches are very detailed and precise. These make for beautiful drawings and paintings, and we absolutely love them! 

In this course, we will explore a more whimsical interpretation of line botanicals. Victoria has been doing a version of this style since her art school days, for everything from botanicals to anatomy. We'll be learning how to loosen up a bit and create botanicals with loose movement and imprecisions. She'll walk you through how to embrace imperfections in your piece and stylize your botanical drawings. 

We'll use both pen and brush to explore this style so you can see how it can apply to many different mediums. 

We have a decent amount of things we're changing this semester that we're super excited about!! We chatted a bit about how we're restructuring courses to be available FOREVER (see the blog post a bit further down for more info!), but we have a few other things we're going to be changing as well!

Scholarships:  Each semester, we award two scholarships.  We feel that part of our responsibility as educators and creatives is to give back and help build our own community.  This semester, we're awarding two scholarships, but the courses themselves are going to be different.  In the past, recipients have received class passes for the semester (all 6 courses), but this semester, we're going to allow the recipients to build their own semester by selecting 6 courses from any semester. 

"I'm attending" badge: GIVEAWAY!!  Once you've registered for a course, you'll have access to our "I'm attending Design House Prep School" badge.  Anyone who posts their "I'm attending" badge along with our #designhouseprepschool hashtag between September 1st and September 14th will be in a drawing to win a styling package from Design House of Moira with fun product, paper, ribbons, and styling goodies!

Bonus Videos: We're also changing the structure of our bonus videos a bit.  Since all courses will be available forever and ever, we'll be making bonus videos specific to their semester.  If you're new to our school, we've had a few bonus videos for our first two semesters.  We usually chose topics that are current, relevant or interesting in our industry, but don't take up a full course.  So far, we've had:

- Mistakes We've Made and Lessons We've Learned - Karen and Victoria sit with cocktails and chat about all the stuff they've screwed up, how it happened and how they fixed it (or will fix next time around!)

- No Such Thing As A Bad Client - we ruffled feathers a bit and challenged people to look at client relations differently with the idea of there being NO SUCH THING as a bad client.  

- Bow Tying and Wax Seals - We get asked sooooo often how we tie bows and knots so straight, as well as our process for wax seals, so we made a mini course out of it!

- Styled Shoot - We talked about how to find them, work with them and what type of expectations to have going into it

All past bonus videos will no longer be available for new students, but anyone who registers for a Semester III course will have access to this semesters bonus video(s).  Students of Semesters I & II will retain their access to past bonus videos.  We will, however, resell some of these as a mini course coming up.  

As a reminder, courses are open for registration on September 1st and class starts September 14th!!

Maybe you work full-time in another industry, you've been working hard on that creative side-hustle, and you think you're finally ready to go full-time. Maybe you've always been the go-to in your social circle for anything art-related, but you did everything for the joy of creating (read: free of charge) and now you're ready to go pro. Maybe you haven't done anything artsy in years (or ever!), and you're debating whether to dip your toe into metaphorically creative waters, but not sure how to approach reallocating time from your other responsibilities. 

Unless you're a hermit in a cave with zero human interaction (but you somehow have internet?), in which case, hello! But unless that is you, you probably have other people and responsibilities in your life who have expectations and claims on your time. Maybe your family life is structured around you being at work in an office. Or maybe your family life is structured around you NOT being at work, office or not. Maybe you used to give away your awesome works of art for free or at cost, but now that you work for yourself, every hour you're creating things for free is an hour you're not spending on your business. 

Maybe all of that is true and you, your family or your friends are all struggling to adjust to a new paradigm where you want to support each other but haven't developed the right scripts to communicate. Many of us have experienced this to one degree or another, but for those who have really struggled with this idea, this will hit very close to home.  

This semester's course in Eliciting Support will walk you though the struggle of being in a relationship or having friends and family who don't support you or struggle to do so in your pursuit of a creative career.  We'll be looking at communication cues and practices and the laws of reciprocity when working on getting your significant other or family and friends on board with your creative business. 

If anything we described above sounds like you, this is the course for you! Can't wait to see you there!

xoxo
DHPS Team

Dear Stationer Friends, this one is for you!

Commercial printing, whether you outsource or print in-house, is never as easy as just hitting Ctrl+P. Learn the ins and outs, save yourself time, money and sanity as we walk you through choosing the correct design + paper + printing method for yourself and your clients from the start. If you've ever struggled to finish a project on time due to printing snafus, last minute design changes based on printing methods, or struggled to reconcile your client's vision with your printing capabilities, this is the course for you!

In addition to the nitty gritty of actual printing, we'll also be looking at helping your clients make their paper/printing decisions correctly through education, correct presentation and bringing in some "spin" that we'll learn in the Art of Saying No. 

We love spools of dreamy hand-dyed silk ribbon from other creatives as much as anyone. Trust me, we have boxes on boxes of ribbons in the office! But sometimes you just need a few pieces for a small project, or perhaps you just can't quite find the right color to match your project. Maybe the price is too high for you and your client, or you just love fabric and would love to know how to dye it yourself. 

No matter the reason, this course will teach you the basics of sourcing, dyeing, and using fabric in your creative pursuits. We'll look at everything including how to tear fabric down to ribbons, dye fabric to match specific projects, and use fabric for large scale lettering and painting projects. 

As a bonus, we'll also touch on how to price fabric-related projects, using principles we discussed in Pricing I and II! Pricing weird projects like this aren't as straightforward as they could (we wish!) so we'll do our best to break it down in a way that can help you make your decisions about how much your fabric endeavors should cost. 

Hey lovelies, we have an exciting announcement!

Drum roll… We’ve decided to restructure how we offer the Design House Prep School courses.

Here’s the deal. Initially, we had decided to run Prep School on a true school schedule, moving on from one semester to the next and expiring courses following each semester.  We chose to structure our school this way to help teach time management and to encourage people to actually consume and finish the courses by giving them a deadline.

A year into our Prep School adventure, we’ve noticed a few things.  Firstly, for various reasons in and out of their control, people are not finishing courses within the semester time period. Secondly, as new students discover and join our school, there are previous semesters’ courses that interest them and would help them on their journey as creative business people.

We hear your concerns, we want to work together to grow everyone’s businesses, and we want our community to continue to flourish. So! We’ve decided to make the courses perpetually available for everyone. Once you buy a course, that video is YOURS--to start when you're ready, to finish at your own pace, and to go back to any time you need a refresher. We try to pack as much information into those 45 minutes (or more! …because sometimes there’s too much to talk about…!) as possible, and we love that you guys re-watch the videos to check in on your own progress. And now you can do that any time you want!

Now here’s the part we’re really excited about. Here at Prep School, we really believe in not just taking the money to invest in ourselves and our businesses, but also taking the time to follow through on a monetary investment and actually take the classes we purchase.

We’ve all been there. You read a catchy launch email, you get inspired by the beautiful pictures of what you could learn… your credit card info is saved in your browser… And then real life happens and your online course just sits out there. On the internet. Waiting for you. And worst of all, you don’t learn what you wanted to learn in the first place!

With this in mind, for our upcoming semester of Prep School, we have some super awesome perks for students who complete their coursework in a timely manner. If something happens and you can’t quite swing finishing the lessons within the time frame of the semester, no worries, you’ll still get access to the awesome courses, the Facebook group, school-wide live streams, and bonus videos. 

Sweet.

However! Students who complete their courses* by a certain date in the semester—this time that date is November 16, two months into the semester—will get some perks.
*completed an entire individual course or at least one whole course in the class pass

No. 1 - Our eyes on your work

Homework up to this point has been less of a focus that we would like, so for the first few months of this next semester, we will be putting more focus and attention on homework.  Assignments will be more interactive, and anyone who posts theirs on our private Facebook group during the semester will get direct feedback and support from the DHPS team.

No. 2 - Special access

Students who have completed their courses by November 16th will get to participate in a Live Q&A session just for them!  Less students in the Q&A means more time to go in-depth into your questions and issues with specific examples so we can really work through and try to find solutions. Prior to the Q&A, you’ll get the chance to send in your specific questions to make sure we answer everything for you!

You might ask, how is this different from our regular school-wide live sessions? We like to use those as a chance to make announcements, discuss the school, and get to hang out with you, our awesome students! In comparison, these sessions will focus on problem-solving and us being there to help you specifically.

No. 3 - Even special-er access!

Finally, finishing your classes by November 16 will automatically enter you into a random drawing for a 45 minute one-on-one mentor session with Victoria to ask or discuss anything you would like. Seriously, anything! Three lucky students will be chosen at random, and we’ll get the mentoring on the books for January.

Whew! That’s a lot of information. Thanks for sticking with us. Shoot us an email if you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you.

TL;DR -- classes are available for you forever! Awesome perks available for you this semester! We’re super psyched to launch this semester!!

All our love,
Victoria, Karen, Monday & the Menagerie

Here, have some pretty ribbons <3

Semester III is almost here! 

We have all our classes lined up and we're excited to share them with you! 

Registration will begin on September 1, so keep an eye out for our launch email!