TEACHING ARTIST SESSION CATEGORIES
Something as beautiful and as fragile as a butterfly needs to be captured in art! Participants will learn how the monarch butterfly migrates to Mexico each fall, returning to Canada in the spring, and sometimes passing through Louisiana. They will create a butterfly using several art techniques, discuss art and science concepts that include animal life cycles, migration, and symmetry.
Move over, Betsy Ross! Students will show their classes’ patriotic pride and become visual artists in this session where classes will create a class flag using the basic elements of line, pattern and repetition. This session can be customized to relate to various themes and events, so let your vision fly!
Your history, your heritage, your time to explore artistic composition! Students will be their own creative founding fathers and mothers when they design a piece of art that incorporates American historical events or symbols. And yes, this session can be customized and linked to various lessons and events.
Using watercolors to paint ocean scenery? It’s a match! This is the perfect opportunity to learn about seascapes. Classes will be painting a beautiful sunset, learning how to blend colors for the sky and the sea, and identifying parts of a landscape painting as they create with watercolors.
Under the sea! This session is an artistic adventure on the ocean floor. Students will learn how to paint an eight legged octopus from a reference image, how to use contrast in their art for layering, and how to incorporate shapes and texture. This class includes a science component: there will be time to discuss some of the unique characteristics of this beloved sea creature.
We do not all get to be pet owners in real life, but through this session, we can become pet owners in the art world. This is also a class for emerging sculptors. Students will use air dry clay to create a mini-pet animal to display, and will learn how to roll out and cut pieces or body parts and attach to the main figure. It’s not just a classroom…it’s a zoo, a wildlife preserve, an animal rescue, and an artist’s workshop.
Ever hear students ask, “When are we ever going to use this?” This hands-on, arts-integrated workshop transforms the humble ruler from a classroom necessity into a powerful tool for architectural design. Students put measurement concepts into immediate action by drafting their own custom cityscapes, seamlessly blending precision math with creative visual art. Students will master real-world ruler skills, geometric precision, and spatial reasoning through architectural drafting, explore the impact of warm and cool color palettes to transform flat drawings into dynamic, expressive urban environments, and balance structural guidelines with creative choice as students engineer and style their own ideal city skylines. This session delivers an ideal balance of rigor and creative play. It directly reinforces STEM/math standards while giving students full artistic ownership of their work—leaving them with a striking portfolio piece and a clear answer to why math matters in the real world.
Illustrations make great teachers, and that is true in this case. Students will draw referencing images of tropical fish, and create details with line designs and patterns. Then, they will use a watercolor resist technique to complete and enhance the piece. Multiple techniques, multiple chances for visual expression!
You LOVE to eat them, and now you will love to DRAW them! In this session, students will learn how to draw a crawfish step by step. But this will not just be any crawfish…students will be exposed to Acadiana artist Hannah Gumbo’s drawing style and discover how she takes a drawing and transforms it into lots of different things! So that crawfish is more than just good eating!
The stars are your guides…not just in astrology, but in this session that introduces students to artistic tools and concepts. Students will be asked “As you’re standing in a forest and looking up, what do you see?” Students will then utilize a collection of brushes and tools in order to paint and draw their visualization. They will learn shapes, perspective, depth, and position when viewed from a particular point of view as they paint a nighttime scene of stars, a moon, sky and tree tops.