BeBrave Art Space began as a handful of people in Cape Town and Johannesburg who wanted to talk about drying times, cheap paper and honest critique without the applause. This page is about the people behind it, the rules we keep, and why the forum stays slow on purpose.
BeBrave started as a handful of sketchbooks passed around a Cape Town kitchen table. The moderators below are the ones who still answer beginner questions at midnight, split critique threads when they drift, and drag a folding stool to the Saturday plein air meetups. None of them are gatekeepers. All of them draw.
Life drawing coordinator, Johannesburg
Runs the Thursday evening life sessions in Maboneng and has been drawing from the figure for eleven years. Handles the pose schedules, the model bookings and the awkward first ten minutes when nobody wants to start.
Materials and grounds
Mixes his own gesso and has ruined enough panels to know what humidity does to rabbit skin glue. Writes the long posts about drying times, cheap paper that still holds charcoal, and when to stop sanding.
Critique section moderator
A printmaker who keeps the critique rules short and enforced. Her line is simple: say what you see, say what you would change, and never tell someone their work is nice when you mean it is unresolved.
Beginners board and onboarding
Answers the questions people are embarrassed to ask, from how to hold a pencil to why their shading looks muddy. Keeps a running list of free reference sources and local shops that sell single sheets.
Studio diary and documentation
Logs what actually worked each week, including the failures. Photographs finished work on a plain wall with a phone and a sheet of card, and shows the before-and-after so nobody thinks it takes a lightbox.
Plein air meetups, Western Cape
Organises the Saturday outdoor sessions, checks the wind forecast, and knows which spots have shade by mid-morning. Also runs the offcut exchange thread where members trade paper and board scraps.
BeBrave Art Space did not start as a website. It started as a Tuesday evening in a borrowed studio in Woodstock, where six people brought whatever they had been working on and talked about it honestly. The threads you read now are the same conversations, just written down and kept.
First year
The earliest decision was the hardest to keep: no praise without a reason. Every critique post had to name what was working and what was not, in plain language, and the person posting had to say what they were unsure about. That single rule pushed out the applause threads and pulled in people who actually wanted to improve. It also meant beginners could ask basic questions about pencil grades or fixing charcoal without being talked down to.
Second year
Members kept running into the same practical walls, so we split the forum into boards that matched them. One for daily sketch habits and the small routines that survive a full work week. One for materials, where people compared cheap paper that still takes charcoal and argued about gesso drying times in humid coastal air. One for life drawing sessions in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and one for Saturday plein air meetups that get cancelled when the south-easter picks up. The studio diary board came last, and it is the quietest, which is exactly how it should be.
Where it stands
We never added follower counts, likes or ranking. Members trade offcuts, ask how to photograph a finished print without a lightbox, and work out how to price a first small exhibition together. Some threads move slowly for months. That is fine. The forum is built to be returned to, not refreshed, and the people who stay are the ones who show up and keep making.
BeBrave Art Space started because a handful of us kept meeting in kitchens and shared studios around Cape Town, passing drawings across a table and saying what we actually thought. The internet had plenty of places to post finished work and collect hearts. It had almost nowhere to put up a half-finished charcoal study and hear that the shoulder was wrong.
So we built the thing we were missing. A forum where the reply you get is about the drawing, not about you. Where a beginner can ask why their pencil lines keep going shiny and get an answer instead of a lecture. Where someone in Johannesburg can find out how long a linocut takes to dry in Highveld winter, and someone in Durban can say what humidity does to their ground layers.
Critique threads run on posted rules: say what you see, say what you would change, and be specific about both. Praise is welcome when it is earned and explained.
There is no follower count here and no ranking. A first sketchbook page sits in the same board as a ten-year studio practice, and both get read on their own terms.
Daily sketch logs, Saturday plein air meetups, offcuts traded by post. The measure of the place is whether members are still making work six months after they join.
A working studio habit, a few people who know your hand well enough to notice when it changes, and a straight answer when you ask how to price a first small exhibition or whether that panel is really dry. That is the whole effect we are after. Nothing louder than that.