Supporting art around the world during COVID-19

Good afternoon drawing community!

For the last few days, I have been RACING to get some new features together to support art students around the world as they struggle with social distancing and quarantine measures. 

Tonight, around 11pm PST (Find that in your time zone here) we'll have a brief period of downtime to install the first part of those updates.

If all goes well, this will include:

• The ability to set up a private "study group," ideal for taking your drawing classroom online. 
• Each study group can designate one or more instructors.
• Instructors can post announcements, assignments and calendar events.
• Each study group will have its own private discussion forum.
• Other optional features, such as the ability to see how much practice time students in your study group have logged practicing on the site.
• If you are an instructor who has had to close down your RL drawing/painting/sculpting/whatever that needs a figure model class, please contact me -- I will give all of the students in your study group a full membership for the month at no charge.

What if you are a solo student, practicing on your own without the help of an instructor? Sometime in the next few days we will be offering pay what you want full memberships:

• You will be able to participate in this "pay what you want" month even if you're already a subscriber; you won't be rebilled for your subscription until the extra purchased time runs out. 
• If what you can give for the month is only $1, that is okay. Absolutely no guilt or pressure. 
• If you are lucky enough to be able to afford more, I do encourage you to give more to help support the site's extra bandwidth costs and lowered revenue during this time period of necessarily high traffic.

I encourage us all to spend a little more time offering critiques to each other in these coming weeks, as many of us will suddenly be trying to practice with vastly less support than before.

More info and updates coming soon. Be safe everyone! :)