Blogshop Austin

Now that I'm out of college, its seems more difficult to find opportunities (and time) to continue to learn new skills. For the last two years I've wanted to build up my design chops starting with Adobe Photoshop. So when I heard that Blogshop was coming to Austin last December, I decided to take the leap and sign up for it.

Blogshop is a two-day Photoshop bootcamp for bloggers and content creators. Los Angeles-based Bri Emery and Angela Kohler started the workshop in 2011 and have traveled as far as Sydney and Berlin to host these classes, which seem to sell out as soon as they're announced.

My experience at Blogshop was great! As someone who had hadn't even opened Photoshop before the class, I now feel comfortable navigating the program and using shortcuts to create shapes and images that used to take me hours to do. My classmates included photographers, small business owners and bloggers from all over the map, and the classroom was the prettiest one I'd ever seen with rustic flower arrangements, mismatched chairs and sweet little succulents. All these details created an inspiring environment to learn and dream up ideas. I left Austin that weekend feeling both exhausted by the amount of new things I learned and renewed by the inspiring environment and creative women that surrounded me.

If you're serious about taking your blog to the next level, I highly recommend Blogshop. Click here to see if Bri and Angela are coming to your city. And if they're not, you can now sign up for an online version and learn from the comfort of your home. See more of the pretty little details of Blogshop ATX including the goodies we received on the Blogshop Blog.

{Images 3, 5, 6 taken by the Blogshop girls}

An inspiring quote for the budding creatives:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” -Ira Glass