Cloudland: A Youth Art Studio and Gallery in Petaluma

Picture a sunny corner studio on Petaluma's Western Avenue, sewing machines humming, kids hunched over watercolor washes, and a wall of half-finished sculptures growing taller by the week. That place is Cloudland, and it is quietly becoming a second home for North Bay families who want their kids to make real things with their hands.

A Petaluma Studio with a Heart for Long-Form Creativity

Cloudland is the project of artist and educator Beth Tisthammer, who put down roots in Petaluma in 2011 and opened the studio at 900B Western Avenue as both a youth art school and a working exhibition space. Beth came up through the pioneering Artquest program in high school, spent a decade supporting artists with developmental disabilities at Becoming Independent's ArtWorks in Santa Rosa, and most recently worked as Arts Coordinator and children's teacher at Artaluma Community Arts Center before launching Cloudland. Twenty years of teaching, curating, and exhibiting in the North Bay sit inside the walls of the studio she now runs.

What makes Cloudland feel distinctive the moment you walk in is the pace. Beth writes on her studio's about page, "In an age defined by digital distraction and shortened attention spans, I see art as a vital way to restore patience, focus, and imagination." Classes run as six-week series, and camps run as full week-long projects, so kids work on the same body of pieces long enough to revise, finish, and exhibit them. The studio's mission, in Beth's words, is to guide students "through the frustrations and triumphs of taking an idea from concept to completion." Parents tend to notice it in their kids within a few sessions: a project that comes home and stays out on the kitchen table, a finished piece their child is proud of, a willingness to keep going when the first try did not work.

Kids Classes in Petaluma: Real Skills, Real Projects

Among kids classes in Petaluma, Cloudland's after-school series stand out for their format: each class runs about six weeks with the same group of kids, so children get to know their classmates and their materials, and the work has time to develop. Class sizes stay small (typically eight or nine kids per session), so there is real attention from Beth at every step.

Here is a taste of what is on the regular schedule:

• Upcycled Art Clothing (ages 8 to 13). Students learn to transform garments using embroidery, fabric paint, beading, and applique. They can bring in their own pieces or pull from Cloudland's textile archive, and finished work can be submitted to the end-of-session gallery show in the studio's exhibition space. This is the class for the kid who already lives in their fashion sketchbook.
• Illustration Studio: Making Places (ages 8 to 13). A six-week dive into atmosphere and setting using watercolor, pencils, and acrylics. Kids work on a sustained body of imagery week after week, the way working illustrators develop a portfolio, and watch their hand get better at the things it could not do in week one.
• Upcycle Soft Sculpture (ages 7 to 13). Stuffed forms, found textiles, hand-stitching, and structural problem-solving. Less about a perfect finished object on day one, more about how to design something with your hands and revise it.
• Friday Family Creativity Club and gallery participation. Cloudland regularly invites students into the gallery side of the studio for hanging shows and openings, so kids see their pieces installed, lit, and talked about by visitors at an actual opening.

The through-line across every class is Beth's belief that "the process not only builds technical skills but also fosters resilience, pride, and the confidence to share one's voice with the larger community." Translated for parents: kids leave Cloudland with both a finished piece and a small set of real techniques (cutting, stitching, glazing, layering color) that they can carry into the next thing they make.

Kids Camps in Petaluma: Summer Half-Days That Pack a Punch

Cloudland's summer programming is one of the more interesting answers to the question of kids camps in Petaluma, because the camps run as half-days from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., which is a kind sweet spot for the elementary-school crowd. Long enough to make real progress, short enough that younger kids do not melt down, and structured so families can pair it with a swim afternoon or grandma time without overscheduling.

Each summer typically opens with a lineup like this:

• Upcycle Summer Sculpture (ages 6 to 12). A multimedia sculpture takeover of the Cloudland gallery, where the group collaborates on a single full-scale fantasy environment built from cardboard, textiles, paint, and wood. Engineering and aesthetic decisions are made together, and parents who walk in on the last day tend to do a double-take at what the room has become.
• Upcycle Summer Fashion Accessories (ages 7 to 13). Hats, bags, jewelry, and keychains built from unconventional and reclaimed materials, with real sewing-machine instruction along the way.
• Ray's Deli Mural Lab (ages 8 to 13). A mural painting camp connected to a real Petaluma business, so kids design and paint a piece that goes up on a wall in town where they (and their friends, parents, and grandparents) can walk past it all year.
• Costume Create (ages 6 to 12). A pattern-and-construction camp where kids design and build a costume from scratch, working with paper drafting, basic sewing, and finishing details.

Half-day camp pricing lands around $327 for the full week, which for five mornings of small-group, project-led instruction in a working art studio is in line with what families are used to seeing in the North Bay. As with classes, capacity is intentionally low (eight to nine campers per session), which gives Beth time to work one-on-one with every kid each morning. Beth describes her teaching philosophy as cultivating "spaces where discipline and proficiency are balanced with courage and authenticity," and that shows up most clearly in camp, where a kid who arrived on Monday convinced they "can't draw" is often walking out on Friday holding something they made and are visibly proud of.

An Accessible Resource for North Bay Families

A few practical things parents tend to ask about. Cloudland's cancellation policy is clear and family-friendly: notify the studio at least two weeks in advance and you get a full refund minus a $35 cancellation fee, and if a class does not hit minimum enrollment and has to be cancelled by Cloudland, the studio absorbs the fee and refunds the family in full. That kind of clarity matters when you are trying to plan a summer with one kid in camp and another at swim lessons.

The studio sits at 900B Western Avenue in Petaluma, easy to reach from anywhere in the Petaluma area and a reasonable drive from Sonoma, Cotati, Penngrove, Novato, and the broader North Bay. It is small, which means kids and parents quickly become familiar faces to Beth, and it is built around a single founder-instructor model, so the experience kids get is consistent week to week and year to year.

For browsing and registering, Cloudland lists every current class series and camp on Enrichment.kids, where you can filter by age, by date, and by category and sign up in a few clicks. It is a quiet convenience for parents who finally remember at 10 p.m. that they wanted to grab their kid a spot in the next session, and it is one of the easier ways to keep an eye on Cloudland's rolling schedule of new offerings.

Where Patience, Craft, and Community Flourish

What stays with parents after a season at Cloudland is not really the finished sculpture or the embroidered jacket, although those are nice to have on the shelf. It is the change in how their kid talks about making things. They use words like "next time" and "the part I want to fix" and "I want to keep going." That is what a six-week class series and a working gallery on the other side of the door can do for a child who is given space to take their work seriously.

Patience, craft, accessibility, creativity, community, Cloudland Studio embodies all these values for North Bay parents and kids. If your child loves making things, or if you suspect they would love making things given the right teacher and a long-form project, this is a quietly excellent place to start. Browse Cloudland's upcoming class series and summer half-day camps on Enrichment.kids, drop Beth a line at the studio, and see what your kid grows into over a season at 900B Western Avenue.