Creative partner handbook
Planning is the first and most important part of creating your class. This is when you decide on your topic, come up with a fun and engaging class project, and get your thoughts organized. Great planning makes production much easier (and faster). If you put the time into planning at the start, the whole class creation process will go more smoothly!
You’ll want to teach on the topics you're passionate about and our students are always eager to learn from new teachers who bring a unique style and perspective. Our most popular topics include mixed media, encaustic, portraits, watercolor, digital media and much more! We see a lot of interest in topics related to living a creative life — from learning artistic skills to adjacent topics that make creative living better (like self-care, meditation, and more). That said, all topics are welcome and as Studioworks grows, so does our audience. We see new topic areas growing in popularity all the time.
Here are some best practices to keep in mind when you’re deciding what to teach:
Get specific
It's best to keep your class focused on a specific subject that you know well and are confident sharing. Specificity will differentiate your class from others on the platform and will keep it digestible. Along with specificity, keep your class concise (we typically recommend between 2-4 videos per lesson with a run-time of 20-30 minutes per video). Overall, keep your class focused and manageable.Ask yourself: “What would I have loved to learn when I was new to this?”
Thinking back to the early days is a great way to put yourself in your students’ shoes. What did you find tricky, or really confusing? Not only will this give you a topic you know a lot about, it will help ensure you find an audience that’s hungry to learn it.
Start with the projects
As you’re thinking about topics, consider the projects you’ll have your students create. Look to your own work for inspiration. Is there something you’ve made that you’re particularly proud of? This approach will also help you focus your class, covering just the skills students will need to make the project at the end.
We are often asked how we come up with the concepts for our classes. We would love to tell you we have them all locked up in our heads and ready for action at anytime, but this is FAR from the truth. Our best classes are simply an expression of where we are personally in our artistic journeys.
The concepts for the class lessons often arrive late at night or slowly gather in a cozy corner of our minds, building momentum - until they solidify. When that happens, we usually write down our thoughts and any names that might come along with the idea.
Our next step is to create a secret pin board on Pinterest, where we squirrel away images that tie together, in both process and theme. This is the fun part! Sometimes they just hang out that way - suspended online as a visual collage.
Other ideas, the stronger ones, rise to the surface. Then, we go back to pen and paper. We write down ideas for warm ups, lessons and lectures. Next, we consider what overall theme and or concept ties the class together.
We imagine where we want to take my student and what the journey will look like. What do we want them to achieve by taking our classes. We always like to consider alternatives to my process too, for example, we’ll encourage the students to image transfer or trace an element onto their canvas if they are not comfortable with free-hand drawing. Our goal is always to just get people MAKING ART anyway they can.
Here are some of the pin boards created for different classes so you can see how we tie imagery and ideas together.
Here are three tips for creating a class project your students will be excited to create and share!
Make your project easy to start.
Students are more likely to do a quick, lightweight exercise than an intensive, complicated project. Starting with a “Warmup Lesson” will allow you to create bite-sized, manageable projects that feel easy to start, and give students an immediate sense of accomplishment.
Make your instructions clear and easy to understand.
Your project description is your opportunity to encourage students to create and share their work. Keep it clear and straightforward. Feel free to attach files or include additional resources, but keep it focused on the project (in other words, don’t provide so much background information that the student gets lost in the details). If your project requires multiple steps, list them out to keep it digestible.
Encourage students to share their work along the way.
Remember, we’re all here to learn! Encourage your students to share their work-in-progress. The more work students share along the way, the more feedback they'll get from you and other students, which makes for a better learning experience.
Outlining your class is a great way to ensure your video lessons are well-organized and engaging. The outlining process can also help you think through the nuts and bolts of class production. Use our class concept and planning template to get started.
The most popular classes inside Studioworks include 2-4 videos within each lesson, broken down into a series of 20-30 minute videos. As a first step, start thinking about how you can break up your class into sections and what filming style might work best for your content.
Next, create a bullet list of sections and sketch out your main talking points for each. Some teachers prefer to write out a full script for each video. Unless you’re a good actor, reading from a script may feel rote or robotic. Often teachers will create bullet points for each section and will talk through it organically, making sure they hit on each point. Whichever method you choose, follow these best practices to ensure your video lessons are organized and engaging (and remember to consult our quality guidelines carefully as you work).
Writing a good sales page is important in order to quickly guide the prospective student to make their purchasing decision. When writing your sales page, keep in mind the following structure…
1. Introduction to the class
2. Sales video (if you wish to have one)
3. Description of your projects
4. What you’ll learn in the class (with project examples)
5. Who is this class for
6. Supplies list (if you have one available)
Here are a few sales pages for you to use for inspiration:
https://ivynewport.com/the-painted-camellia
Classroom Sales Page Template
We''d like to discuss creating a class syllabus and how we go about it. We referred to it in the video but here are our thoughts in the written form too.
We have discovered that the most successful classes for us are relatively short, delivered all at once to the student and are structured similar to this:
Introduction (1 Video Optional)
Warm Up Exercises (1-3 Videos)
Project 1 (2-4 Videos)
Project 2 (2-4 Videos)
Project 3 (2-4 Videos)
Bonus (1-3 Videos)
Resources
Goodbye
In our experience, this gives the student plenty to work on but isn’t overwhelming. You hold their attention and they can move through the class with relative ease. These days the amount of online art classes is overwhelming, so we believe it is best to keep things succinct. This way you can hold your students attention before they are distracted by the next offering.
From a production standpoint, this also creates a “doable” structure for you. Sure, we know plenty of awesome and very successful 12-week classes by fantastic artists but we know ourselves enough to know that we don’t want to be in the same thing for that long. A solid class with three to four well thought out projects, full of great instruction, and a consistent theme will hold strong.
The point is, know yourself. If you like to bust through something so you can move on to something new, then seriously consider the length of your classes.
