Thanks for signing up for my North House Folk School class. You can find the registration letter for your course below.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions in the meantime!

Table of Contents

• Registration and Cancellation
• Participant Package
• Intro to Insect Photography
• Hand-Drawn Maps: Exploring Your Relationship with the Land
  • 📍 Before the Course: Choose Your Place
  • 🌟 Inspiration Gathering (Optional but Fun!)
  • 🧰 What to Bring
  • 🎨 Student Discount
  • 🌬 Dress for Outdoor Moments
  • 🙌 I Can’t Wait to See What You Create
• Hand-Drawn Maps: Documenting Your Journey
  • 🧰 What to Bring
  • 🎨 Student Discount
  • 🌬 Dress for Outdoor Moments

Registration and Cancellation

One thing to note is that the North House Folk School’s registration and cancellations policies apply to this course. You will find different policies on my website. Those govern workshops run through my photo workshop company.  

Participant Package

I offer a comprehensive participant package for the photography classes run through my own photo workshop program. Please, review it because it may have information that would be useful for you while preparing for the North House Folk School class. It has a lot of information and some of it may not be relevant to the North House class.

You can also read through my full workshop participant package. https://www.bryanhansel.com/workshop-participant-resources/

Intro to Insect Photography

Hello and welcome to the Intro to Insect and Macro Photography course! I’m excited to share my passion for close-up nature photography with all of you.

Preparation Work: To prepare for our time together, I recommend reading through the camera manual to get familiar with the various settings we’ll be using for macro work. Having a basic understanding of aperture, shutter speed, and focus will help you hit the ground running.

Macro Gear: Please also bring along any macro/close-up lenses or extension tubes you may already own for your camera system. If you don’t have dedicated macro gear yet, don’t worry – you can use your mid-range zoom and extension tubes. Extension tubes also work well with shorter telephoto lenses, such as a 70-200mm. Extension tubes are hollow tubes that fit between your lens and camera body. They reduce the minimum focusing distance of the lens, which allows you to shoot macro subjects without requiring a macro lens. They have electronic contacts to maintain lens functions, such as aperture and autofocus. Make sure to buy extension tubes that are compatible with your camera system. Most sets run between $50 and $100. You’ll want to cover at least two sizes. The first should be around 12mm in size and the second should be around 24mm. Most sets come in this configuration. If you are going to buy or bring a macro lens, I recommend one that’s 90mm or longer. Longer lenses give you more working distance. That means that you can photograph insects from further away and avoid frightening them.

Clothing: Be sure to dress in layers for the outdoor shooting portions and bring a hat, sunscreen, a bug shirt or bug head net, and water/snacks. Closed-toe shoes are a must as we’ll be venturing off-trail a bit to find our tiny subjects. While it may be tempting to use bug spray to ward off mosquitoes, we want to avoid that because it can cause other insects to flee. If you want a recommendation for a bug shirt, I highly recommend The Original Bug Shirt. Also bring rain gear, an umbrella and a rain cover for your camera. We will be outside regardless of the weather.

Tentative Schedule: Our tentative schedule is as follows, but it will be modified based on conditions.

Friday:

• 3-6pm: North House Folk School Classroom Presentation. Bring all your gear in case we head out into the field.
• 6pm: Wood-fired pizza bake.

On Friday, the North House Folk School often has a pizza bake. You bring an ingredient to share and bring your own drink. The North House supplies dough and the wood-fired oven. You make a pizza. They bake it. We’ll find a place to hang out and you can ask more questions or share stories. You can also bring a friend/family member.

Saturday:

• 6-9am: Field photography session
• 9am: Breakfast break
• 10am-1pm: Classroom processing demonstration
• 1-2pm: Lunch Break
• 2-4pm: Field photography session

Carpooling: The field sessions are in the field, so you’ll need to have a car to meet at the session sites or drive together to get there. I highly recommend carpooling because some of the locations have limited parking.

Hand-Drawn Maps: Exploring Your Relationship with the Land

Hand-Drawn Map Making: Exploring Your Relationship with the Land

Thank you for joining me for this creative and meaningful mapping adventure!

In this course, you’ll learn how to design hand-drawn maps that reflect your personal connection to a place and not just where things are, but what they mean to you. We’ll build maps in layers, explore outdoor sense-mapping activities, and look at how details like lettering, symbols, and color bring a landscape to life.

No artistic experience required. If you can trace a line, you’re ready! Mapping is for everyone!

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📍 Before the Course: Choose Your Place

To help us hit the ground running, please select a location that matters to you — a lake, a family cabin, neighborhood park, favorite hiking loop — anything that lives in your heart.

Then email me the following:

1. Open Google Maps and find the center point of your chosen area
2. Right-click and copy the latitude & longitude
3. Estimate the distance from the center to the furthest point you want to include
   • Example: “About 2 miles from the center in any direction.”

Send your info to: bryan@bryanhansel.com
Please send this at least two weeks before class.

I’ll create a traceable 6×6 inch base map for you using satellite imagery so you can jump right into drawing once we begin.

Here’s a how to video.

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🌟 Inspiration Gathering (Optional but Fun!)

Start noticing the elements that make maps feel magical:

• Compass roses
• Scale bars
• Legends & labels
• Decorative borders
• Sea monsters (yes, really!)
• Any quirky map features you love

Bring along any examples, sketches, or printed references that spark your imagination. The more ideas, the merrier!

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🧰 What to Bring

Required Tools
• #2 or mechanical pencil + extra graphite
• Eraser (plastic or kneadable preferred)
• Small pencil sharpener
• Black fineliners (Micron 005, 01, 05 recommended)
• Colored pencils — or watercolor pencils with a brush ​(at least two shades of green, one blue, one red, one yellow). I like Derwent Inktense Watercolor Pencils because they are highly saturated.

Optional Tools
• Watercolor paints or crayons
• A brush or water brush if using watercolor pencils
• Clipboard, triangle, compass (drawing), lettering guides
• Fancy paper for final touches
• Sketchbook
• Laptop/tablet with Google Earth installed

Provided Tools
• Tracing paper 8.5×11
• Masking tape
• Hot-press watercolor paper for the final project (if you have a special size in mind or would like to use cold press (textured) paper, feel free to bring your own)
• Extra white paper
• Rulers
• Scissors

Good news!
Thanks to an Individual Artist Project Grant made possible in part by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, I have loaner lightboxes, so you do not need to bring acrylic tracing sheets unless you prefer your own setup.

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🎨 Student Discount

Students receive 10% off art supplies at Joy & Co. in Grand Marais — just mention you’re taking one of my classes or show your student card.

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🌬 Dress for Outdoor Moments

Weather permitting, we may step outside for short activities like sense mapping — pacing, smelling, or sketching our surroundings. November can be chilly, so please dress warmly!

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🙌 I Can’t Wait to See What You Create

This class is all about your connection to place — your lines, your memories, your map. Whether you’re capturing a favorite shoreline, the backyard you grew up in, or a slice of wilderness that inspires you, your final piece will be uniquely yours.

If you have questions or need help choosing a location, reach out anytime:
bryan@bryanhansel.com

Hand-Drawn Maps: Documenting Your Journey

In this hands-on two-day class, students will learn to create hand-drawn journey maps that capture the stories, discoveries, and memories of their travels. On the first day, we will head outside for a short hike and practice observing the landscape, noting features, collecting details, and sketching the raw elements needed to build a meaningful field map. On the second day, we will work indoors and create a finished map based on a past or future journey while learning how to bring personal experience into a visual narrative. Students will explore techniques for illustrating landscapes, highlighting points of interest, adding written observations, and capturing the small moments that make each journey unique.

This course is ideal for anyone planning an adventure or hoping to commemorate one they have already taken. No artistic experience is required. If you can trace a line, you can create a map that tells the story of your travels.

Students are encouraged to bring photos, notes, or memories from a past journey, or come prepared to plan a future adventure they want to map.

🧰 What to Bring

Required Tools

• Number 2 pencil or a mechanical pencil with extra graphite
• Eraser (plastic or kneadable preferred)
• Small pencil sharpener
• Black fineliners (Suggested: Micron 005, 05, 01)
• Colored pencils ​(at least two shades of green, one blue, one red, one yellow)

Optional Tools that Might be Helpful

• Watercolor pencils. I recommend Derwent Inktense Watercolor Pencils.
• Watercolor brush and cup if bringing watercolor pencils. Consider Pentel Aquash Water Brushes.
• Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen Brushes for adding shadows to illustrations or symbols:
  • Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen Brush – #230 Cold Grey 1 (or Warm #272)
  • Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen Brush – #220 Light Indigo (for winter maps)
• Triangle
• A pair of compasses (drawing compass)
• Rapiddesign Lettering Aid Template
• Staedtler® Mars® Template, Circle Combo or other templates
• Journal stencils
• Sketchbook 
• Laptop or tablet to view maps and aerial photos or satellite images. Install Google Earth if you are going to use it this way. 

Provided Tools
• Tracing paper 8.5×11
• Masking tape
• Hot-press watercolor paper for the final project (if you have a special size in mind or would like to use cold press (textured) paper, feel free to bring your own)
• Extra white paper
• Rulers
• Scissors

Good news!
Thanks to an Individual Artist Project Grant made possible in part by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, I have loaner lightboxes, so you do not need to bring acrylic tracing sheets unless you prefer your own setup.

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🎨 Student Discount

Students receive 10% off art supplies at Joy & Co. in Grand Marais — just mention you’re taking one of my classes.

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🌬 Dress for Outdoor Moments

Weather permitting, we will be outdoors for most of one day mapping the world around us on a short hike of up to two miles.