Welcome Anya Toomre!

Welcome to our newest instructor, Anya Toomre! Anya will start teaching at Cloud 9 in September, bringing new sketching classes to our school. And we are thrilled!

Her first workshop, Create an Ink & Watercolor Travel Journal,  will take place on Wednesdays 10:00-12:30 September 5 – October 10. 

Her second workshop, Playing with your Food in a Sketchbook, will happen on Wednesdays 10:00-12:30 October 24 – November 28.

For more information about this workshops and to register, please visit our page of adult classes.

In Anya's own words:

I am an avid sketchbooker, note-taker, storyteller and traveler. My main love is documenting bits and pieces of life from the ordinary and mundane to the more exotic and grand. Whatever I come across is fair game to record. 

I grew up in the Boston area with an academic family and went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for both my BS and MS degrees. The latter was in the social history of textiles and I’ve spent over twenty years as a textile and fiber artist. 

I’ve been fortunate to live in and travel to many different places in the US and abroad. I’ve lived in Japan, North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco), the Netherlands and England. I have also spent significant time in Cuba. 

While living abroad I taught English. I home schooled my kids for eight years and ran a home school with three other families for a year. My biases were textiles, art and language. I was one of the art instructors for Silver Kite in 2017. 

In 2011, I took a watercolor class using a sketchbook and something clicked. It felt so very right for me. Since then I’ve taken classes with local artists Charlene Collins Freeman and Eileen Sorg, in Cuba with Laura Quincy Jones and online with Danny Gregory and Koesje Koene, Liz Steel, and Jan Blencowe. I am always looking to improve my skills, but consider ink and watercolor to be my mediums of choice. I can get the precision I like with a pen and the colors and brightness I love with watercolors.

My classroom approach is to be inclusive with a calm and encouraging attitude. I’m a recovering perfectionist (if that’s possible) and understand how it can be difficult to start new things. The process of sketching and documenting is very satisfying as is getting to a completed end of a project. Beginners to sketchbooking and travel journaling are welcome as are more seasoned sketchbookers.

For more information and to register for my workshops, please go to my website at www.anyatoomre.com. If you have any questions, contact me at anyatoomre@yahoo.com.