Saturday 31 May 2014

What We Need to Get Started - What You Get for Helping Us

We have started a fund raising project on indiegogo: Elderly Women in Patras Learn Watercolor Painting

 

If you wish to help us, please either go to the project and contribute or use the donation button on the left for a secure donation using PayPal!

 

What We Need

The funding schema for this project is flexible, and we shall start the project with any funds we manage to get for the beginning, hopping we will get more on the way. To give you an idea of what materials are needed for the workshop, we have clearly established some value-dependent kits and needs that they cover. The milestones gives you an idea about how the project will be implemented with the raised funds.

Kits

Starter Kit. It is estimated at approximately 35 US$, and it covers a set of cheap materials needed by each lady for the first 5 sessions of the workshop. It includes: (a) one Cotman watercolour box (small plastic palette + 12 half pans watercolor paints + a small brush); (b) 2 cheap brushes; (c) 2 sheets of watercolor paper; (d) pencil and sketchpad
Beginner Kit. It is estimated at approximately 80 US$, and it covers a set of cheap/student grade materials needed by each lady for half-year (15 sessions) of the workshop. It includes: (a) one Cotman watercolour box (small plastic palette + 12 half pans watercolor paints + a small brush) and one set of refilling watercolor pans or tubes; (b) 3 cheap brushes, (c) 8 sheets of watercolour paper; (d) pencils and sketchpads
Full Kit. It is estimated at approximately 300 US$, and it covers a full set of student/artist grade materials needed by each lady for the full-year (30 sessions) of the workshop. It includes: (a) one watercolour folding palette, (b) 5 watercolor brushes, (c) a set of 12 watercolour paints for the entire duration of the workshop, (d) 25 sheets of watercolour paper; (e) pencils and sketchpads; (f) other materials (boards, mediums).

Milestones

1st Milestone: 150 US$. It covers: ~3 Starter Kits (+ ~45US$ indiegogo and bank fees)
2nd Milestone: 500 US$. It covers:~10 Starter Kits (+ ~85 US$ indiegogo and bank fees)
3rd Milestone: 1000 US$. It covers: ~ 10 Beginner Kits (+ ~150 US$ indiegogo and bank fees)
4th Milestone: 1500 US$. It covers: ~ 15 Beginner Kits (+ ~220 US$ indiegogo and bank fees)
5th Milestone: 3500 US$. It covers: ~ 10 Full Kits (+ ~400 US$ indiegogo and bank fees)
6th Milestone: 5000 US$. It covers: 15 Full Kits (+ ~550 indiegogo and bank fees)

What You Get

My way to thank you for your financial support go make this project reach the goal is to send you either high quality prints (professional materials) of some of my paintings, or, if qualified, to paint for you custom floral original watercolors. For the custom original watercolors I am going to ask you to provide me with a "motivation" (why do you want a particular flower/subject painted?) and any other additional details needed. Depending on size, each original painting will take some time to complete, and as soon as the campaign for the project is finished I will let you know of the estimated time of delivery. I will start with the larger original watercolors first. Please notice that I retain all the copyrights on the image of the paintings, you receive the original painting but you are not allowed to reproduce it by any means without my written permission. We can also discuss the possibility to exchange the perk with paintings available for sale on my website, which means I can send it to you imediately after the confirmation of your contribution.

Thursday 29 May 2014

Welcome to our e-space!


My name is Otilia Kocsis, and I volunteered to teach a 30 weeks workshop (1 session of 2 hours per week, ) in watercolor painting to retired women (aged over 60 years old) at one of the community centers in my city (Patras, Greece), which will hopefully be only the first in a series to follow. The workshop is foreseen as 1 session of 2 hours per week, it will start in September 2014 and will end in June 2015. The number of ladies expected to attend in the first group is about 15 (10 already confirmed).

The community center has space and infrastructure (room to host the workshop, furniture, etc) to support the project, but there are no any funds to support with the necessary materials, like watercolor paper, paints, brushes, sketch blocks, pencils, etc. Due to the crisis, it is almost impossible to find any governmental support for this workshop. Also, I cannot afford to pay these by myself, thus I am trying to find alternative ways to raise the necessary funds.
One of the first things that came to my mind is crowd funding, and in order to make it worth and rewarding for people around the world to help with this project I am offering some of my Open Edition prints and my free time and painting abilities to create custom floral watercolors (subject choice and directions of the contributors to the fund raising campaign) as rewards. If you would like to find out more, please check my project titled Elderly Women in Patras Learn Watercolor Painting on Indiegogo. Even if you cannot contribute yourself, I would really appreciate any pins and noise you can make about it!

So, this blog is dedicated to host news about the workshop(s) that will take place under this concept. For each new workshop we are going to create a new page, with additional information on the attendants, and progress work of each of them. This way you will have the opportunity to see the project growing and getting on track. After each session we will also post a wrap up of what happened, which was the aim of the session, the difficulties we encountered, the main concerns and achievements of the group.

You are welcome to enjoy the journey with us, and we also invite you to join us!