Ep. 17: Draw with no talent (with Danny Gregory of Sketchbook Skool)

Danny Gregory is an international best-seller, and the co-founder of Sketchbook Skool with tens of thousands of students worldwide.

He previously spent three decades as one of New York’s leading advertising creative directors. With that, he has created award-winning, global campaigns for clients like Chase, American Express, IBM, and many others.

Through his many books—including Art Before Breakfast, Everyday Matters, and The Creative License—and in the several large online communities he oversees, Danny has shown thousands of people how to ignite their inner artists, embrace their creativity, and tell the stories of their lives. From Indiana to Indonesia, people who haven’t drawn since grade school have picked up the creative habit and have gone on to publish books of their own and show and sell their artwork.

Danny is a co-founder of Sketchbook Skool, a video-based art school designed to inspire creative storytelling through illustrated journaling. Taught by the world’s best illustrators, artists and educators, Sketchbook Skool encourages its global community of over 15,000 students to draw and keep a sketchbook, regardless of skill level.

Where to find Danny

• Sketchbook Skool: sketchbookskool.com
• Danny Gregory: dannygregory.com

Read the full transcript below.

Danny Gregory: I discovered that drawing isn’t what we think of when we think of drawing lessons. You know, go and draw a bowl of fruit or a skeleton or a naked person or something like that. Then actually drawing something that can be integrated into your daily life and you can draw what you eat for breakfast. You can draw the other people on the bus as you go to work. You can draw literally anything and it all is art or maybe it’s not art or maybe that doesn’t matter, but it is a really fun thing to do and it really, I found it incredibly centering and meaningful and that’s, that was, that was a process that started 20 years ago and I still draw every day and I still love it.

Announcer: That’s Danny Gregory, the cofounder of Sketchbook Skool and author of nearly a dozen internationally bestselling books on art and creativity. But Danny didn’t always define himself as an artist. In fact, it wasn’t until his thirties that he started putting pen to paper after his wife had a serious back injury. His first book, a memoir called everything matters, shared his story of learning to draw while she was in recovery and it struck a chord from there. He continued to publish books and later online courses about the power of everyday art. And if you take one thing away from today, know that this isn’t about talent and it isn’t about becoming a professional artist more than anything. Danny says that he loves making things and helping other people to find their way to doing the same. So let’s learn how he does it.

Announcer: Welcome to Everything is Teachable, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes to learn how everyday creators have transformed their skills and passions into online courses and businesses. To introduce this week’s episode, here’s your host, Melissa Guller.

Melissa Guller: Hey everyone. I’m Melissa from Team Teachable. And today I’m here with Danny Gregory. Danny Gregory is an international bestseller and the co-founder of Sketchbook Skool, with tens of thousands of students worldwide. He previously spent three decades as one of New York’s leading advertising creative directors, and he’s created award-winning global campaigns for clients like Chase, American Express, IBM, Ford, and many others. Through his many books – including Art Before Breakfast, Everyday Matters, and The Creative License – and in the several large online communities he oversees, Danny has shown thousands of people how to ignite their inner artists, embrace their creativity, and tell the stories of their lives. From Indiana to Indonesia, people who haven’t drawn since grade school have picked up the creative habit and have gone on to publish books of their own and show and sell their artwork. Danny is a co-founder of Sketchbook Skool, a video-based art school designed to inspire creative storytelling through illustrated journaling. Taught by the world’s best illustrators, artists and educators, Sketchbook Skool encourages its global community of over 15,000 students to draw and keep a sketchbook regardless of skill level.

Melissa Guller: Well, Danny, welcome to the podcast!

Danny Gregory: It’s just great to be here.

Melissa Guller: I’m so excited to learn more about you, and get to really take listeners into the story of Sketchbook Skool. So to kick things off, how did you first learn how to draw?

Danny Gregory: Well, I didn’t actually start drawing until I was in my late thirties. So I drew as a little kid like we all do. But it wasn’t until I was in my late thirties when my, my wife had an accident and she was disabled and it was a very sudden and kind of shocking event that changed my life and my family’s life literally from one minute to the next. And I had spent quite some time looking for kind of meaning and purpose. Like what was, what was the purpose of my life? What was the meaning of this thing that had happened to my wife? How are we going to cope with this? Um, my wife had had, had an accident that left her paralyzed and in a wheelchair. So, you know, we just had a lot of new things to figure out and I found my way to drawing as a, as a basically like a calming, therapeutic meditative exercise.

Danny Gregory: I guess more than anything, it was a way of really getting to live in the present rather than living in, in kind of fear and anxiety that I had around this accident. And everything that had happened. So I started as a draw and then I started to keep an illustrated sketchbook that became like a diary. So it was an illustrated journal and I would carry it with me everywhere and I would just record my daily, daily life in this sketchbook. And as I did, I learned to draw so many different things. I discovered that drawing isn’t what we think of when we think of drawing lessons, you know, go and draw a bowl of fruit or a skeleton or a naked person or something like that. Then actually drawing is something that can be integrated into your daily life and you can draw what you eat for breakfast, you can draw the other people on the buses, you go to work, you can draw literally anything and it all is art or maybe it’s not art or maybe that doesn’t matter, but it is a really fun thing to do and it really, I found it incredibly centering and meaningful and that’s, that was, that was a process that started 20 years ago and I still draw every day and I still love it.

Melissa Guller: It’s interesting to hear you talk about how it was a form of journaling for you because I think maybe some pressure that comes in when people imagine drawing is, Oh, other people are going to see this. What if it’s not very good, but your art wasn’t really for other at the beginning it sounds like so maybe that took some pressure off.

Danny Gregory: Yeah, absolutely. I think drawing in a sketchbook as opposed to, you know, thinking about drawings that are going to hang on the wall or you know, be seen publicly is, is a very different process because when you draw in a sketchbook, it’s a single page that you’re doing a drawing on. If you don’t like the drawing, you turn the page and you have a blank slate and you can start afresh. But, but what happens is over time you start to fill up the sketchbook and you start to fill it up with experiences, with memories, with feelings, and the, it becomes a book about your life. So the fact that there are drawings in it and whether or not your drawing ability is as good as you would like it to be, that becomes less important and what matters instead is, is your experience recording your life?

Danny Gregory: I think it’s similar to saying, I’d like to keep a diary but my handwriting isn’t very good or I’d like to keep a diary, but you know, I’m not a great speller. Those things wouldn’t get in your way, so why should it get in your way? Withdrawing again, as you say, it’s a private thing. I think over time also is something you may choose to share. It doesn’t really matter if you do or don’t, but I think it is certainly something that you will share with the future versions of you who will look back on this time and and be able to experience it once again.

Melissa Guller: Hmm. I do like that perspective that you’re offering on the fact that it’s for you or I think the comparison to the handwriting or the spelling is something that will make sense to a lot of people, but I still have to ask. I do think there’s a misconception. A lot of people say, I just can’t draw. So do you think that that’s true? Some people just don’t have it.

Danny Gregory: I don’t think so. I, in fact, I have a new book that’s coming out in a couple of months that’s called how to draw without talent and that’s actually the name of one of the, our bestselling course on, on a Sketchbook Skool.com how to troll without talent because we have this feeling that talent is this sort of thing that we’re given at birth and either we have it or we don’t have it and if we don’t have it, there’s no point in proceeding. My feeling is maybe talent exists or maybe it doesn’t. I don’t really know and I don’t really care because if talent is something that I don’t have, I can still have all this fun. I could still have this exp experience. I can still go on this journey and I don’t need talent to do that. I can have this, this feeling, so maybe having talent makes it a little bit easier.

Danny Gregory: Maybe having talent maybe makes it possible to make a living doing it, but I equate it with cooking. I think that there are people who are talented chefs, right? There’s no question we ask. We say our to ourselves like, you know, so and so. It was a really talented chef, but that doesn’t stop you from making an omelet that doesn’t stop you from, you know, grilling a burger. You, you don’t say, well, I don’t have any talent for cooking, so therefore I guess I just won’t cook. So why should that be true of this? When we were five, six, seven, we had no idea. Talent was, we took a bunch of crayons and we drew, you know, and maybe somebody had talent and the teacher hung it up on the wall and maybe something other kid didn’t and he didn’t really care. I want to go back to that time when we’re just not judging. We’re not condemning ourselves, we’re not limiting ourselves, but we’re just enjoying ourselves and we’re getting all the enormous benefits that we get at an art making and meditation and contemplation and self analysis and all these other things.

Melissa Guller: Meditation I think is a really interesting comparison. I think a lot of people group art into the performance world, you know, it’s something that is on a wall. It’s something that people can see or it’s something that’s physical. But throughout this conversation so far, I’ve noticed that you’ve really been tying art to meaning or introspection, which is a really refreshing perspective to me. It’s not something I’ve really considered before.

Danny Gregory: Yeah. We make a distinction between art with a capital a and art with a small a, we call it. So our with a small a is just everyday art. It’s the grilled cheese sandwiches of art, you know, and art with a capital a is in galleries and auction houses in museums and that’s nothing to do with us. What we’re doing is we’re doing the equivalent of of whistling in the shower. You know, we’re doing the equivalent of dancing by yourself to your favorite song in your room. It doesn’t have to be something that anybody else sees. And the fact is that even if somebody does see what you’re doing, I’ve never encountered any reaction except, boy, I wish I could do that. So if I’m sitting in drawing in a cafe or a park and somebody sees what I’m doing, that’s the reaction. It’s not like, what are you an artist? Do you think you’re so great? What do you make money doing that? No, they say, Oh, I wish I could draw. I wish I drew. You know? So I think that’s a feeling that we all have. So why do we limit ourselves by worrying about professionalism and audience and so forth when we can just try it, do it, see what happens.

Melissa Guller: [inaudible] and to your point, people are focusing on the scale, whether it’s remarking, Oh look at them drawing. I wish they could do it. Or even for us, we’re about to talk to people who are learning how to draw. That’s about you and the skill that you’re developing. And certainly I think that ties us right into teaching. So how did you first get that idea to start up? What became Sketchbook Skool?

Danny Gregory: Well as I said, I didn’t learn to draw, you know, I mean, I, I may have taken an art class in high school, but I didn’t remember any of it. So when I sat down to start drawing, I just kinda did it and then I did it some more and then eventually it just became easier and I felt more confident. So I wrote a couple of books and then I started blogging in about 2003 and I started to develop an audience and people saw my drawings and they started to say, well, will you teach me to draw or will you, do you, do you do workshops? That kind of thing. I’d never been to a workshop, I didn’t know anything about it. And eventually I was invited to do some workshops and to do some public speaking on art and to, to teach. And I felt very hesitant about it at first.

Danny Gregory: Honestly, I just, I th, you know, it’s, it’s one thing to know how to do something or to kind of think you know, how to do something. And it’s quite another thing to sort of have to retrofit. What does it mean to teach somebody else to do that? And so the first class that I taught was here in New York at a place called the open center. And it was uh, they said, well, we would like you to teach a five week course every evening for five weeks on like a Wednesday. And I thought, Oh no. Like I have no idea what, what that would entail. It’s like how long has it, well, generally two to three hours. And I thought, okay, let’s try it. Let’s see what happens. Yeah, exactly. So, so I went and I kind of just sorta started making it up and I would admit to the people who are in the class, I said, honestly, I don’t know what I’m doing, but let’s see what happens.

Danny Gregory: And I actually was speaking to somebody a couple of days ago who took that class 15 years ago and he said, that changed my life because it was an opportunity to just kind of all learn together. You know, I didn’t have the feeling that like you are some expert that I had to gain your knowledge or I had to like we could all kind of stumble along together. And that to me is a natural way to learn and it’s a natural way to learn art, which is the way I learned to. So as I said, I taught a couple of things, but then I did a workshop in Massachusetts and it was a weekend long workshop. And again, this is like the fourth or fifth time I had done this and I’ve always been ambivalent about it, but each time I was sort of really, somebody insisted that I try.

Danny Gregory: So I had, I think it was 45 people came to this place in Massachusetts for the weekend and we worked our way through it and it was a lot of fun and there was a lot of community feeling that developed among these students and I felt a bit more confident about it. But at the end of the weekend I was completely exhausted. I lost my voice for about three days. It was just really draining. And I thought, boy, this is an awful lot of work for 45 people. I spent, you know, a couple of weeks preparing for this and then three days of teaching and you know, it was, I got paid okay, you know, for the time, but it just, it didn’t feel like really a good use of my time. And I had been working in advertising for 30 years. I’d been a creative director in advertising and I was used to reaching really large audiences.

Danny Gregory: Obviously, you know, you do a Superbowl commercial and 100 million people watch what you do. So spending the weekend with 45 people just felt like a different scale. I just didn’t know how to process it, really, why I’d be evaluated. And then, so I’d seen a few people who were teaching online. I had a friend in San Francisco who is teaching sort of, I would call them sort of creativity coaching classes. And then I knew a couple people who taught some form of trying online. It seemed sort of interesting. But as it, uh, I had been online for since the early two thousands at that point. And I had actually created a couple of online communities, actually in the 90s I had created communities. One was on then became Yahoo. And so I really understood the benefits and the possibilities of lots of people gathering together with a common interest.

Danny Gregory: I, I understood that natively, but I didn’t really know about teaching, but I didn’t know a lot about video production because I had made a lot of commercials and I had been the director’s Guild and I knew a lot about editing. So I had these different skills. I knew I knew how to present stuff. I sort of knew about drawing. I kind of knew about, you know, I knew, did know about production and I sort of knew about online stuff. So I was invited to speak at a conference in Amsterdam and when I was getting ready to go there, I’ve mentioned on, I think it was on Facebook, I said, I’m coming to Amsterdam as anybody who’d like to get together, you know, who lives there. I just like to hang out and talk to you about drawing and stuff. And one of the people who contacted me was a woman in kosha Kona who is an illustrator and she’s based in Amsterdam.

Danny Gregory: And she ended up actually becoming my business partner in Sketchbook Skool. And so we met up and we had a cup of tea we talked about. And I, I kind of told her about these various things that I was doing. And, and she had been, she had taught one or two courses on an, on a different platform, not on Teachable, a different platform and had like reasonable experience doing it. And then when I came back home, we continued to discuss this idea over email. And I knew quite a lot of artists who taught workshops and who did stuff. I had a big kind of collection of people I’d gathered over the years. I’d written a couple of books with other people. And um, so I had a lot of good connections for other people who maybe could go into this with us. And so we decided that we would make our first course and it was going to be a six week course and each of us would do one week.

Danny Gregory: So it would be six teachers, six weeks and we would see what happens. He would, it was like, so is this a one time thing? That’s one project of many other things that I was working on. I’ll just do this one project. And we decided that each teacher would produce their own content, would shoot their own videos and kosha and I would be in charge of developing the platform, doing the marketing and we would figure out how to share the revenue between all of us. So we did this first class and we talked about it for a couple of months beforehand online with our various communities. We kind of merged our different communities and there was a lot of interest and we, the platform that we were on could take 2000 students. And when our first course came out, it sold out like we couldn’t take more than 2000 and that was it.

Danny Gregory: So we filled it up. So that was interesting. It’s like, okay, we charged $99 for this course and without really an awful lot of work or planning, we sold out and made quite a nice profit from it. So this seemed like, okay, this is an interesting thing to do in the response to the class itself was phenomenal. I mean a real community developed around it. There was just so much interest in it and the approach that we had. So then we went off and did another one and then we continue to do it. Now we, on Monday, we’re launching our 27th class or kind of stemming from that original class and we named it Sketchbook Skool from the beginning because it was a school to teach you how to draw in a sketchbook. And we spelled school with a K because we want to say it’s not really a serious school, it’s just kind of fun.

Melissa Guller: [inaudible] and I have to say the branding on your website is very fun. It seems like the kind of place that you would take a course, you would have an enjoyable time doing it. It doesn’t feel very like hoity toity high pressure.

Danny Gregory: Yeah, I mean from my experience, there’s a lot of nonsense around our education. There’s a lot of jargon, there’s a lot of authorities. And you know, I just remember the, you know, a couple times in high school and I did take our classes just being kind of mystified by the whole thing. And I think a lot of people did feel that way and I just wanted to capture sort of the fun and the, you know, the idea that we’re, we’re not authorities. I mean our, our motto for our company is art for all. And the idea is, you know, anybody can learn to do this at any level. You don’t need talent, you just need an interest in doing it. So we always wanted to make it feel friendly, accessible, and not authoritative.

Melissa Guller: [inaudible] and I do hope that people might check out Sketchbook Skool.com because it is a really beautiful site to look at. Beautiful. In terms of user experience. Like it feels good to be on your website, which you did not pay me to say, but I do really love your site. Thank you very much. Yeah. I’m curious. We have to go back for one second to the fact that you sold out, did you say 2000 seats the first time you did this? Yes. That was the first time. How did you possibly find 2000 people right off the bat? Wow.

Danny Gregory: Well, as I said, I had been blogging for a while, so I had about 40,000 readers of my blog. I had written at that point probably four or five books, some of which had generated 75 to 100,000 copies have been sold. Each of our teachers also had followings online and so when they publicize to their people that this is going to happen. There was a lot of interest there and this isn’t a unique thing, like nobody had really had had this experience of one class with all these different teachers and all these different points of view and that it was about sketchbook art, which is something that hadn’t really been focused on before. The idea that it’s not just about learning to draw, it’s about this experience of keeping a sketchbook as a journal and recording the world around you. And the variety of different teachers that we had.

Danny Gregory: We had very different artists who were doing this, so it just seemed like something new and different and we also spent, as I said, two or three months kind of talking about it, making videos about it and we pretended that we had developed this whole school and I would talk about, you know, here I am on the campus and then we shot stuff like in California where I would pretend that that’s where the football stadium was going to go and we just did a lot of fun things to kind of generate feelings that what this is going to be like, that it wasn’t going to be a normal online class. It was going to be an experience that was going to be great fun.

Melissa Guller: [inaudible] I really love how many teachers you brought in because there are so many benefits that you’ve just listed, whether it’s the different perspectives, the different styles, their different backgrounds or even through the fact that it means one sixth of the work for each of you in a lot of ways. And then the audiences that each of you brought to the table for that initial launch. And I think that that’s such a smart approach.

Danny Gregory: Well that a lot of those things did change over time. I mean now we’ve had, we have close to 60 teachers who’ve worked with us, but, but what we decided after two or three, probably by the time we got to our third course, we had been asking the teachers to make their own contents that they, some of them would shoot at themselves, some of them would hire, you know, some videographer to shoot stuff. But it wasn’t good enough for me. Like the quality of it was like, okay, but I really wanted to make something look diff. I mean, I’ve seen so many online classes and I’ve seen things that people shoot with webcams and they shoot, you know, that feel very stiff. And I’ve seen infinite numbers of YouTube tutorials in one kind or another with the overhead camera shooting down at a desk. And, and I just wanted to avoid all that.

Danny Gregory: I, I really wanted to make films that were at the same level as what I was used to making with advertising. So by the time we got to our third class, we started to hire crews and we would film, we would go and we would actually, all the artists the teacher had to do really was to present that one day we would go, we would film them with our crew and then we would come back and we would do all the post production. And so it became much, much more intensive labor for us. And we also changed our financial arrangements with the other artists. So rather than them kind of sharing in the proceeds, it became that we paid them as if they were talent and we acted a little bit more like, like a publisher would than like a cooperative. It was the only reasonable way to do it because what I’ve discovered is that there are people who are great at drawing and making art.

Danny Gregory: There are people who are great at teaching and there are people who are great at presenting in a video and it’s rare to find people who are all three of those things. So our job became turning artists who we loved sometimes turning them into teachers cause sometimes like me, they had never taught and sometimes turning them into, you know, figuring out ways to get them to perform, figuring out ways to develop the scripts with them and you know, to film them in ways. And we filmed all around the world. We’ve used all kinds of technology. We’ve used green screens and drones and we’ve rented stages. We’ve gotten more and more complex over the five years that we’ve been doing this. It certainly sounds like it. Well in addition to obviously scaling quite a bit and getting the different teacher arrangements, like you talked about the financials, all of that.

Danny Gregory: How else has your business shifted over the last five years? Well, so we continued to develop an audience around the classes, but then we fairly early on we started a Facebook group and the Facebook group was a closed Facebook group that was actually a request from our first students. They said, I want to make art and share it on Facebook, but I don’t want to necessarily let everybody in my social circle know that I’m drawing. A lot of people just felt apprehensive about it and they, and they were willing to share what they were doing with other people who are in the same boat, but they weren’t necessarily, they didn’t necessarily want, you know, their cousin or their coworker coming up and saying, Oh, a nice drawing of a tree. So we had this group and it grew. I mean we ended up, we have, I don’t know, 35,000 people in the group now.

Danny Gregory: So we just developed a big community there. And then that community of people in the classes, because we did a lot to try and encourage discussion in the class itself. So it wasn’t just that you are presenting a drawing or doing the homework for the teacher. In fact we made a point to say the teacher’s not here to grade your work or to evaluate your work. It’s your responsibility kind of as a grownup to to take what you can from the teacher. But ultimately if you want feedback it’s going to come from your classmates. And that worked really well. I mean, initially we ha we, we always have teachers kind of going in and making some comments. But you know, we’ve had at an a 60,000 students now in our classes and you just simply can’t expect an artist to go in and make comments on all this stuff.

Danny Gregory: It just isn’t, it isn’t useful or or possible. But getting feedback from other students worked really well and it was encouraging. And we also have weekly webinars when we launch a class so that the teachers are available to anybody who wants to come to the webinar to ask questions. So you do have an opportunity to ask questions of the teacher if he didn’t understand something about what they were saying, but you don’t necessarily get the opportunity to have like a one-on-one critique of your work. So all these things to help to develop this community, which ultimately led to us creating a sort of another aspect of our business, which is what we call sketch con. So it’s kind of like comic con, but it’s for sketching. And uh, we had our first one in Pasadena last fall, 500 people flew to Pasadena and we had a four day event there where we had workshops and presentations and parties and sponsors. And so having live events that allow the community to get together is another part of, of our business now. Um, so, you know, we’ve continued to expand. We’re also our first book under the schedule school imprint is coming out being released by penguin random house, uh, in November. And we’re just the brand, the brand is continuing to stretch out into different ways.

Melissa Guller: [inaudible]. It’s really interesting to hear about how many elements of community or just having students be able to interact with each other. You’ve brought into things. Because if I were just watching a course online and I felt like I couldn’t draw, even if the video was wonderful, even if the teacher was wonderful, I think I could feel a little bit dejected. But the fact that you have so many opportunities for people to interact with each other or say like, Oh, I didn’t know what I was doing either. That must feel good, you know, be a part of something.

Danny Gregory: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we reinforce the idea over and over again that we are all learning together and this is not about, Oh, she’s so much better than I am. In fact, people encourage each other just for trying and that it’s that it takes some courage to share something that you’ve just done for the first time and we understand that. But we, you know, we really, we explained to people that getting the reinforcement that you get from other people is a crucial part of continuing with the class. I just remember when I first started examining the whole idea of online classes. You know, I remember reading about when all, when lots of universities were starting to put their courses online and you know, you could go and take a history class at Harvard and I signed up for a couple of things like that. Sure.

Danny Gregory: Why not? They were free. And we discussed, you know, fairly quickly it became evident that while large numbers of people signed up, very few people actually completed these classes because there was nobody holding you accountable. There was no feedback. You weren’t really in school. The teachers didn’t know or care who you were. And so it’s up to you entirely as to whether you continue to watch these things. And you know, we just didn’t want to make classes that people didn’t watch. So we tried to do a lot to say, Hey, you know, what did you think? How you feeling about this? What are your problems? What are you getting out of this? You know, and always asking questions. I think with virtually every lesson we have, we encourage discussion. So if we have a documentary about an artist, we’ll pull themes out of what that artist has said to spur discussion.

Danny Gregory: And that creates community feeling as well because people share each other’s points of view and they, and they respond to each other. And so the friendships that have formed just again in this class, and I haven’t seen that in a lot of the online classes I’ve taken and when I’ve gone to big platforms like you know, you to me or Skillshare there you just see, yes, there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of classes. Sure, I guess that’s great, but you just feel like you’re wandering alone through giant empty buildings, you know, or you’re taking class, which you may be enthusiastic about initially, but then you just don’t stick with it. Or if you run into a problem, there’s nobody to ask about it. You know, you get distracted. And I think that large platforms are also devaluing the value of these online experiences so that if you can sign up for $10 and get access to 20,000 courses, that’s, that isn’t necessarily a good thing. You know? I don’t feel like it is, I feel like curated, focused, relevant information is what we want. It’s not necessarily an endless warehouse where you have to kind of sift between the good and the bad and yes, it may be less expensive, but it’s certainly not more valuable

Melissa Guller: sifting between the good and the bad. That also reminds me of the common question of, well, couldn’t people just Google this information and sure you can Google a lot of info, you can get a lot of less expensive courses through marketplaces like you’re talking about, but it’s almost like that information overload probably paralyzes a lot of people from taking any action at all. And I love the insight that you’re sharing about how if you can engage your students and ask them to, you know, do something simple like reflecting on something they noticed in one of the videos or even just do something small and see that other people are doing that as well. I think that makes such a world of difference because otherwise it’s just you and your computer, which can feel very lonely.

Danny Gregory: Right. And I think we’re not really trying to sell information because as you say, you can go to the library and you can take out a book on art instruction. You can watch an endless stream of amateur YouTube videos. There’s plenty of places to do that, but a, it’s a lot of work to do that. And B, it’s just information. What we do is we engage you, so we try to get you to start to see yourself as an artist, as a creative person. That’s not a technical thing. That’s not about information. It’s about encouragement. It’s about coaching. It’s about overcoming your concerns and fears. Why don’t you already know how to do this? Because there are blocks that you’ve had. One of the first comments that we got on our very first class, somebody said, this seems more like self-help than art instruction. And I thought, yeah, it is because you know, learning how to use a pencil is sort of intuitive.

Danny Gregory: And yes, there are technical things about how watercolor works and we, and we certainly will teach you that, but the bigger question is what do you do when you encounter a difficulty? So you start to do a watercolor painting. You’ve learned the technical things, but then suddenly something’s challenging to you. Who’s going to make you keep trying? What if the first drawing you do is ugly and it isn’t what you thought it was going to be do you didn’t give up and to say, I have no talent, or do you, does something make you want to keep working at it because it’s not just again about the information. That’s why schools don’t just hand out textbooks. They have teachers, right? So yes, the teacher may assign part of the textbook to you, but that’s not an education. You need to engage in discussion. You need to be able to ask the teacher with the relevance of what you’re doing. You need to be able to get perspective. You need to be able to think about it. You need to be held accountable. That’s what learning is about as well, not just information.

Melissa Guller: That’s such a good insight. I think for anybody listening who has any interest in being a creator, building online courses, because you can hand anybody a pencil to your point and they could draw something, but the purpose of your course is not draw one thing and then be done. This is something that’s like a practice. It’s something that is even, I would say part of somebody’s identity that they would say, I am an artist. I can do this, and that’s what people want from the online course. They don’t just want a onetime event. They’re looking for some kind of transformation or some kind of new bud of their identity.

Danny Gregory: Exactly. W what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to change people’s lives. We’re trying to help them to accomplish something that they may have wanted to always do. We have a lot of people who took art classes in high school and kind of thought of themselves as part of the RD click, let’s say. And then when it came time to apply to college, maybe somebody in their family said, well, I’m not spending a bunch of money sending you to art school. What are you talking about? You’re going to learn to, you know, you’re going to go to business school. Or maybe they did go to art school, maybe they go to design degree. And then they went in and became designers. But they ended up working in a design department of a bank and they’re laying out brochures and here they are 10 1520 years down the road.

Danny Gregory: And they’re so far from where they were when they had that crazy passion to draw and paint sitting in their bedrooms when they were teenagers, you know? And then finally they say to themselves, this is my time. Like I want to get back to my dream and yeah, I’m, maybe I’m not going to do it for a living. Fine. I’m not going to be a professional artist. But does that mean I can’t do this at all? No. It means I can and I just need classes and a community to not necessarily even teach me, but just give me motivation to do this, to go back to explore, to really learn, to make mistakes, to do experiments, to go on a journey again, that’s, that’s really what I need. And so I think a lot of people who are adults say, boy, I wish I could go to college again.

Danny Gregory: I think I would get much more out of it now. You know? And I think that that’s how we feel. And I think going back to the question about information, like when you pass your learner’s permit to get your driver’s license, they give you that little book that has all the rules of the road, right? So it’s all the information that you need. Theoretically, in order to be a driver, go read this little pamphlet and you’re good to go. That’s, that’s what you need. But of course, that’s how you learn to drive. You learn to drive by taking some driving lessons or by sitting in the car with your parents in the parking lot or the supermarket and practicing. But ultimately you learn to by driving, by driving for probably years before you feel completely comfortable. So those are the different parts of the education that matters.

Danny Gregory: Not what was said in that booklet that you needed to study to pass the test, but what did you really need to learn to drive? You need to make it intuitive. You need to make it feel part of your body, you know? So you could do it instinctively. And it’s the same of drawing. Drawing isn’t just about learning about perspective and for shortening and shadows and stuff like that. It’s about learning to feel and think like an artist to to see like an artist, to give yourself time to find space in your life. All those things human beings need to teach you, not just YouTube videos

Melissa Guller: [inaudible] and to kind of continue something we’ve been circling around. When you are a teacher, you aren’t just giving somebody steps. You’re also motivating. You’re also encouraging. You’re also giving them the idea of what their life could be like if and when they learn this new skill. So it’s so much more than just saying do this and then that,

Danny Gregory: right? Every artists that we introduce in a class, we don’t begin with them teaching you how to do something. We begin with them telling you their story. We make a film about their life. Here I am. Let me tell you about what it was like when I was a kid. Let me tell you about what kind of education I got. Let me tell you about what it’s like to be a professional artist. Let me tell you about who inspired me and let me show you around my studio. Let me show you the materials that I use. Let me take some sketch books off the shelf and show you the work that I’ve done and tell you some stories about it. And let’s do all that. We’re gonna spend an a, so maybe the first half of the lessons in a week at Sketchbook Skool are those kinds of things.

Danny Gregory: Then finally the artist says, all right, let’s sit down and do a drawing. Let me show you how I do this and let me tell you about it as I do it. And so then the artist does a demonstration and you know, maybe they do several different ones and they tell you about what they’re doing and then they’ll give you an assignment and the assignment isn’t necessarily to do what they did. It’s to take everything that they’ve talked about and to say, okay, now you make something. You know. And some people will just copy what the teacher did and others will take this as an opportunity to springboard into something that they’re inspired by and to go in a whole new direction. And that’s the really the opportunity. And that’s why people go back and watch our classes again. We find that giving people lifetime access to our classes is really important because what we’re saying is, look, this is going to be dense.

Danny Gregory: And also it’s going to be an experience that you’re going to go through at once, but then you’re going to take other classes with us and you’re going to want to come back to these earlier classes again and you’re going to want to re-explore it and you’re going to see it in a new way, in a different way, and also it’s going to fit into your life. That’s a crucial part of offering online classes is to say, do this when you want to. You don’t have to be here on Tuesday evening at eight o’clock you know, and you don’t have to get a babysitter and you don’t have to do it when you want to and you know, do it at your own pace. But we also do things to make sure that you’re not going to forget that you signed up for this class. You know, we do a lot of things to send emails. We have magazines, we do an awful lot of stuff on YouTube. We do live events to just remind you that, Hey, remember you sign up for this. Well, get back to class. Do some more people want to see what you’re doing. Don’t forget about it. Cause I think that that’s a very common thing. People are eager to spend the money initially but then they aren’t necessarily eager to spend the time and the effort required to actually go through the course.

Melissa Guller: And to your point they can take the class anytime. But that also puts a lot of the responsibility on them to find the time. So I like what you’re suggesting. You know the beauty of online courses that it’s self paced. You can turn on your computer, you can watch as much or as little as you can, but the reminders help and getting in their ear and encouraging them and giving them little things to do. It makes a huge difference I’m sure. And getting them to actually move through the course.

Danny Gregory: Yeah. I mean we, we generally drip out our content. So if you sign up for a four week class, you will get a part of it each week for four weeks and you will also get an email every Monday morning telling you this is what’s going to happen this week. And here’s a link to get right to the classroom so you don’t have to look up where’s your password and all that other stuff. We try and make it as easy as possible. Then we also have this webinar on Fridays and we’ll send you another invitation to that and remind you that that’s happening. And then also my partner and I, even if we’re not the teachers in the class, we do the homework and we make a video that we call study hall, which is about our experience of doing the homework. And we post that too as another incentive to say, Hey, don’t you want to do this to look what we’re all doing? Look how much fun it is to participate.

Melissa Guller: Hmm. And to briefly go back to the drip content concept, when you’re doing that, you’re emailing out new material every week. If somebody moves ahead more quickly, do you lock the future content?

Danny Gregory: Yes, we don’t. We don’t encourage them to move ahead. When when somebody signs up for one of our classes on demand, they will have access to it. But generally we give them, first of all, we give them enough to do. So it’s rarely the problem that people run out of stuff. It’s more that they don’t manage to complete all of it. But no, we, we definitely think that it’s better to say keeps keep thinking about this, you know, there’s no reason to rush ahead and, and churn through all this stuff. There’s a lot of ideas in here. There’s a lot of stuff to, you know, and if you need more things to do, we’re doing stuff in the community. Other people are posting their work, we’re having discussions about it, participate in all that stuff. And you know, if you want to learn more about the artists your are links to their work, go in and visit their site, check out their Instagram. There’s a lot of other things that you can be doing if you want to learn more. But the idea that you’re going to kind of binge your way through this whole thing is that’s not our intention. That’s not what we want to do. We want to make sure that you are getting this deep into you. It’s not just about, you’re not going to be able to Gorge yourself and get what you would if you, if you take your time

Melissa Guller: [inaudible] and what’s nice about dripping out the content in weeks or pieces is not only is it more manageable, but then as a student you get a sense of accomplishment, little wins along the way where you feel like, okay, I’ve made this week’s worth of progress and now I’m ready for next week’s. But you feel like you did something which is huge.

Danny Gregory: Right? And it’s also not like when you, if you sign up for a course and there’s weeks and weeks of information right there, just that mountain of stuff ahead of you, that can be daunting so you don’t even get started, you know? So that’s part of what it is too. I mean we also, if you sign up for a course before we’ve actually begun it, because we tend to spend about a month promoting our courses before they begin. When you sign up, you get access to Teachable and you’ve got access to go into our classroom and we have some stuff for you to do there. We explain how the platform works. We introduced you to the teacher, we encourage you to go to the school yard. We give you a few tidbits and stuff that you can get engaged right away. Uh, and then we also continue to encourage discussion in social media and in our community about how excited we all are about what’s going to happen.

Danny Gregory: So we might say, have you bought any tools yet for this class? Uh, what do you think is going to happen? What is it going to be like? That kind of thing. So in fact, we have this new class launching on Monday. I just finished doing a live webinar on YouTube, uh, a couple hours ago where I answered questions that people had about the course before it started. And that was an opportunity also to encourage people who are still on the fence about it to say, all right, what do you need to know to make a decision? Let’s, let’s talk about it. So it really feels like, not like purchasing a thing, but getting ready for an event, you know, like as if you were going to a conference or getting ready to go on a vacation is making the anticipation of the launch of it. As fun as the course itself is going to be is, I mean it helps to sell, but it also just makes it more fun for us and for the students.

Melissa Guller: [inaudible] and a lot of ways as the creator, you’re kind of the host of the experience and it’s your job to guide people through.

Danny Gregory: Exactly. I mean one of my kind of idols is Walt Disney and I remember as a kid like watching the wonderful world of Walt Disney and they would always start with walls, like in his office talking to the camera and kind of explaining like, this is what we’re going to do this week. We’re gonna go to Africa or we’re going to go to Mars. And he was like this constant presence throughout the program and we tried it. My partner and I try to play that role too while we’re there each week to introduce you to this week’s teacher and to maybe be there to interview them or you know, as we said, do our homework to talk about it. So while we have a changing cast of characters, we also have the two of us representing our brand, representing a constant personality for the students. Again, not just the content, but really a feeling of I’m part of called and we have people who have taken 27 courses with us. They spent close to $3,000 in art lessons over the years. You know, that’s pretty phenomenal. Um, and that’s because they trust us basically. They say, we don’t care what it is. If you guys are doing it, we want to be part of it and that, that makes our lives easier and it’s very rewarding.

Melissa Guller: [inaudible] am sure. It must be hugely rewarding. I mean, we’ve talked about how many people have gone through your courses at this point in your 28th course, did you say coming out? I’m sure it might be out already actually. Um, by the time this airs. So I did wanna give you a chance just before we go to share, where can people take a look at all your courses and learn more if they wanna check it out.

Danny Gregory: So Sketchbook Skool.com and we spell school with a K. so Sketchbook Skool, one word. So that site is our, basically our catalog of courses is there. There’s also, we give away a lot of free things. We have free core samples, we have newsletters, we have eBooks and all that kind of stuff that you can sign up for there as well. Then we also have a page on Facebook, which is Sketchbook Skool news. And then of course we have our community there and then we have our community on our own platform and we have Instagram at scheduled school. So we’re, we’re on lots of different platforms. We find that Facebook was great for building our community and Instagram is becoming increasingly important to us as well. We personally don’t find Twitter terribly useful because we’re so much of a visual medium and YouTube, you know, we’ve made, I know many, many hundreds of videos over the years that, and we do, we have two weekly series.

Danny Gregory: One is called draw to Tuesday and one is called draw with me. And those are both weekly events. One of them is live and one of them is, uh, is just a weekly thing. But, but we, we, and we, and we’ve had a podcast. So just that we try to hit people in as many different ways as possible. A lot of what drives us frankly, in doing these things is we like it. We think it’s fundament videos. We like making, obviously we’re doing a podcast now. Uh, we like podcasts, we like communicating, we like creating and that’s the most fun thing about this whole business is the opportunity. It’s not, I think some people think of online teaching as some sort of passive income kind of game, like teach something and set it up there and then go and like sit on the beach while your money rolls in. That’s never been my interest. I love this business because it’s so interesting. It’s has so many different facets to it and it’s such a great opportunity to meet people and to learn their stories and to help people. I mean, we help a lot of people and every day, literally every day we get an email from somebody saying, you’ve changed my life. You’ve helped me to accomplish this thing. I never thought I could do. And that’s better than making money. Although making money is nice too.

Melissa Guller: Yeah. And I love that you said you enjoy it. This is something that I think has so many possible creative outlets, different forms of writing and art and video and speaking and so many options that it is really enjoyable. And I think that’s important to bring up.

Danny Gregory: I think if you’re not enjoying it, then your classes will be dull. I think if you’re not passionate about what you’re teaching, I mean, we’ve all had teachers who are, you know, had one eye on the clock or were worried about, you know, their retirement. And we can all smell that, I think. But if you have a teacher who’s like, loves what they’re, what their content is, loves their, their discipline, it’s infectious and that’s how you learn.

Melissa Guller: Well said. We’ve had so much great insights from you throughout this entire episode. I can’t wait for listeners to hear. Before we go, do you have any final words of wisdom or inspiration?

Danny Gregory: Well, I think if you were thinking about trying this, try it. I mean, that’s what I did. We just did it, you know, and in fact, I think the first platform that we use, and I think Teachable has a program like this, it doesn’t really cost you much if anything. Um, so just try it and you don’t have to do elaborate video productions. You can just do a written course, you know, you don’t have to necessarily have huge success right away. I mean, we’ve been building our business over five years, but it’s a really rewarding thing to do and to share what you know, to share what you’ve learned in any field with other people. That’s the reason that we’re here. You know, whether we’re parents teaching our kids, uh, or whether we’re members of a community helping other people who are coming up behind us.

Danny Gregory: It’s something I did in my career as an executive. I taught younger people and they took my place over time. That is, I think the most valuable thing that we can do is to pass on our knowledge. So jump in and do it. Don’t, you know, force yourself into unrealistic expectations about how easy it’s going to be or how hard it’s going to be or how much money you’re going to make or not make. Just try, try doing it, try doing a course and a and, and I think you’ll have a really good experience. Whether it turns out exactly as you thought or not, it will still be right.

Melissa Guller: Great advice. Well Danny, it’s been such a pleasure learning more about how you learned to draw, how you’re passing it forward and the community that you’ve grown. And hopefully people will take a look at Sketchbook Skool and see if they can, you know, try their hand quite literally.

Danny Gregory: Yes, absolutely. Everybody can draw and it’s terrific fun. So sign up for my class, how to draw without talent. It’s uh, it’s affordable. It’s fast and it’s super fun.

Melissa Guller: Thank you so much for joining us this week. You can learn more about Danny, Sketchbook Skool, and Teachable in the show notes at teachable.com/eit17. One more thing before we go. I just wanted to say a huge thank you to all of you listeners out there for helping us become one of Apple’s Featured Best New Podcasts in Business in 2019. Without you tuning in each week and leaving us such kind reviews, we wouldn’t be anywhere. So thank you from all of us here at Teachable and if you haven’t left us a rating yet, we hope you might have a few extra seconds to spare to give us a five star rating and even a short review if you’re feeling extra inspired. So on behalf of Team Teachable, we hope you enjoyed this episode about drawing and creativity with Danny Gregory. We’ll see you in the next episode of Everything is Teachable.