The Meaning Behind the Making: A Creative Journey

Before the shutter clicks, something deeper stirs—a feeling, a memory, a truth. Some images are taken, others are felt. This new online workshop invites you to slow down and create from within, allowing personal meaning to guide what you see and how you share it. In this six-session workshop, photographer and art therapist Carly Sullens guides a transformative creative journey—one that moves past technical perfection and into image-making rooted in authenticity, emotion, and intention.

Over six weeks, you explore your creative core, uncover a personal repertoire of personal visual symbols, and develop a creative intention that guides both your image-making and editing. Intention-setting exercises, expressive journaling, guided assignments, image reviews, and live demonstrations help shape a visual arc—a thread of meaning that runs through your work. Along the way, Carly shares her painterly and composite editing techniques to support your unique visual voice and deepen the connection between intent and final image.

You begin to see how every creative choice—from what you photograph to how you shape it in post—can reflect something deeper. As you move away from automatic habits, your process becomes more intentional, more expressive, and more connected to who you are and what you want to say.

This isn’t about getting it “right.” It’s about getting it real. Work is created that doesn’t just look good, but feels purposeful and undeniably yours. What is innately yours can never be stolen; it’s about uncovering the visual language already within.