I. Inspiration

The idea for Art Camp came one beautiful spring day in 2012 when I was out shopping with my then-girlfriend. I had a notebook in my pocket, coffee in my hand, and time to let my mind wander.

I recalled how many of my classmates back in art school would go on summer break and do absolutely nothing. No art, no studies, no practice. Three months of not making progress towards being better artists. Considering there’s hardly enough time in art school to become a good artist, wasting time like that was terrible. They need every precious hour if they’re going to learn enough about art during school to do well when they graduate.

So I had this idea of an online boot camp where students could spend the weeks between school years studying and improving their fundamentals. The original name was Art Boot Camp. Later I scrapped the “Boot” and turned it into “Noah’s Art Camp.”

The original site, minus some of the original styling.

I looked at the calendar and saw that 12 weeks seemed like a decent length for the course that would fit comfortably between a lot of school years, so I outlined 12 weeks worth of material. I took a nice template from html5up and put together a signup page. It was a description of how the course would run and a Paypal button at the bottom. The Paypal button wasn’t integrated into anything. I had to manually copy & paste the info from each Paypal transaction into a private Mailchimp list. I thought it was going to be a small group so there was no need to bother setting up a seamless registration process.

I did the math and figured if I got about 25 people to sign up, I’d be happy. 25 people x the $225 price sticker would be a bit over $5k and would be a good hourly wage for the hours I was going to spend recording demos.

II. Perspiration

I “launched” the course by sending a small mailing to the people who had purchased my lecture on freelancing for artists. I offered a discount on Art Camp and the first opportunity to join in on the new thing I was making.

I didn’t want to tell anyone else on social media or anything so that when hardly anyone signed up for the course and I knew it was an abysmal failure, I could return everyone’s money, shut down the site, and pretend like it had never happened.

The email I got for the first signup for Noah’s Art Camp.

I still remember sending the email and… waiting. It’s a tense moment after you send out an announcement like that and wait for a first signup.

And then it came. Someone signed up! I couldn’t believe it. They trusted that I could make a great course and teach them some stuff about art. It was a wonderful feeling and a day I won’t easily forget.

The signups kept rolling in. By the end of the day about 25 people had signed up. I had hit my total goal for the course in just a day.

I knew I had something good on my hands here.

Now I just had to not screw it up.

III. Creation

About a month later, the first day of the course finally rolled around. The first two hour demo video was ready to go, the emails were all set, and I had made it. Hundreds of people had signed up for this little idea I had.

The first demo was for master studies and is now available for free on Youtube. It’s probably the most useful exercise for artists and I knew I wanted to open with an ace. It was great. People loved the material and they loved the assignments. I witnessed hundreds of students churning out a total of thousands and thousands of studies. To know that I had a hand in encouraging so much artistic study was both inspiring and humbling. This was why I did all of this. This is why Art Camp existed: To get people to study art and show them how to do it. To serve as a kick in the pants for anyone needing motivation and guidance for those who didn’t know where to go.

I wish I could say that I recorded all of the content months in advance and everything was smooth and easy but that’s not the case at all. My tendency for procrastination got the best of me and I was constantly pushing deadlines till the last minute. But each week I managed to create a demo and get it online for the students. Despite difficulties ranging from crashing computers to a cheating girlfriend, I always managed. Life doesn’t tend to sit idly by, even when we’d like it to the most.

It was quite the summer.

I did plenty of things wrong. I should have automated more of it (yes, manual data entry is slow), I should have been more active in the community, I should have offered more ways to interact beyond the Facebook group, I should have done a lot of things. But even with my mistakes I’m still incredibly proud of what I did. Because I figured out a system where I could teach a lot of people at once and it worked. They learned.

I’ll note now that I have always had (and always will have) a 100%, no-questions-asked, guaranteed refund on any of my online materials. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back. If you loved it and want your money back for whatever reason? Cool, I’ll do that too. The last thing I ever wanted in life was a bitter taste in my mouth knowing that there were people out there who felt that they had been suckered out of their money by me. If I’m going to take someone’s money, I want to know they’re getting plenty of value out of it. To this day, total returns for my courses has averaged about 2–3%. I’m pretty proud of that number.