Rather than simply giving students a new project to complete each week, our curriculum teaches the skills, tools, techniques and ideas behind making art. A finished project may be enjoyable, but knowing why something looks three-dimensional, how perspective works, how to measure accurately, how light creates form, or how to construct something from imagination gives a young artist knowledge they can use for the rest of their life. Each lesson adds another tool to the student's artistic toolbox, and those skills build on one another over time. Our goal isn't to teach students to make our art. It's to give them a strong enough foundation to eventually make their own.
Curriculum Descriptions
Week 1 — Cartooning, Complex 3D Shapes & 3D Letters
Students learn to draw objects such as cars, tables and other forms from imagination by building them from cubes, cylinders and other basic 3D shapes. Benefit: Develops spatial thinking and gives students a practical method for inventing convincing objects rather than simply copying them.
Week 2 — Depth & the Illusion of Space
Students explore atmospheric and linear perspective, overlapping shapes, size and placement to understand how artists create the illusion of distance on a flat surface. Benefit: Helps students make their drawings feel deeper, more believable and three-dimensional.
Week 3 — Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
Using exercises inspired by Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, including the upside-down Picasso and vase-face exercises, students practice drawing what they actually see. Benefit: Strengthens observation and concentration while helping students overcome the tendency to draw what they think something looks like.
Week 4 — Six Drawing Techniques
Students learn drawing fundamentals including proper grip, drawing from the arm and shoulder, measuring, and establishing angles before curves. Benefit: Builds better drawing habits, greater control and a strong technical foundation for future work.
Week 1 — Interior Linear Perspective: 1-Point & 2-Point
Students learn to use vanishing points and perspective lines to draw rooms and interior spaces accurately. Benefit:Develops spatial understanding and gives students the ability to create believable environments from observation or imagination.
Week 2 — Character Development: Arms, Legs, Hands & Feet
Students learn cartooning techniques for constructing limbs, hands and feet while developing characters from memory and imagination. Benefit: Gives students a structural understanding of the figure that allows them to invent their own characters rather than relying on copying.
Week 3 — Character Development: Head, Chest & Torso
Students learn how the major forms of the head and upper body fit together and how those forms can be simplified when designing characters. Benefit: Builds figure-drawing knowledge while strengthening the student's ability to create original characters from imagination.
Week 4 — Measuring with Point & Grid Techniques
Students learn traditional methods of measuring, enlarging and transferring images accurately, including the ancient grid method. Benefit: Develops proportion, patience, accuracy and careful observation while introducing techniques artists have used for centuries.
Week 1 — Measuring with a Viewfinder
Students learn to use a viewfinder to isolate a subject and accurately judge placement and proportion, a method with a long history in Western art, including its use by Albrecht Dürer and later artists such as Van Gogh. Benefit: Trains students to simplify complicated subjects and translate what they see into more accurate drawings.
Week 2 — Drawing with the Camera Lucida
Students explore the camera lucida, a drawing aid with centuries of history, and learn how optical tools can assist with observation and measurement. Benefit: Introduces students to the relationship between technology, observation and traditional drawing while strengthening their understanding of proportion.
Week 3 — Faces: Measuring to Achieve a Likeness
Students learn to measure the unique distances, angles and relationships that distinguish one person's face from another. Benefit: Moves students beyond drawing a generic face and teaches the careful observation necessary to create a recognizable likeness.
Week 4 — Shading, Values, Frames, Simultaneous Contrast & Additive Color
Students investigate value, color and simultaneous contrast, including how surrounding colors and values affect what our eyes perceive. Benefit: Develops a deeper understanding of visual perception and helps students make more deliberate decisions about value, contrast and color.
Week 1 — Drawing Colored Blocks from Life
Students draw actual wooden blocks while studying proportion, perspective, color, light and shadow. Benefit: Builds strong observational and spatial skills and is especially valuable for students interested in fields such as architecture, engineering and design.
Week 2 — Drawing the Hand Freehand
Students draw hands in both simple and challenging poses without tracing or grids. Benefit: Develops observation, proportion and confidence while showing students that difficult subjects become manageable when approached systematically.
Week 3 — Measuring with the Sight-Size Technique
Students learn the traditional sight-size method for comparing the proportions and placement of a subject directly with their drawing. Benefit: Trains the eye to recognize proportional errors and helps students become increasingly capable of correcting their own work.
Week 4 — Watercolor Techniques
Students learn how water, pigment, transparency and the white of the paper work together, along with fundamental methods for controlling watercolor. Benefit: Gives students greater control of the medium while teaching them to work with watercolor's unique qualities rather than against them.
Week 1 — Shading, Edges & Complex Textures
Artists don't draw every leaf, hair or blade of grass. Students learn how values, edges and carefully selected details can create the illusion of complicated textures. Benefit: Teaches students to simplify what they see and create convincing detail without laboriously drawing every individual element.
Week 2 — Gesture Drawing, Foreshortening & Human Proportions
Students study movement, basic human proportions and foreshortening—what happens when a form such as an arm points toward or away from the viewer. Benefit: Helps students create figures that feel more natural, dimensional and alive rather than stiff and flat.
Week 3 — Adult & Child Faces: General Proportions
Students compare the proportions of adult and children's faces and learn how facial structure changes with age. Benefit:Strengthens portrait skills while helping students understand the underlying proportions that make faces believable.
Week 4 — Painting: Brush Techniques
Students practice different ways of holding and handling a brush to create shapes, edges, textures and expressive marks. Benefit: Better brush control gives students greater freedom to make intentional choices instead of simply filling areas with paint.
Week 1 — Two Ways to Think About Drawing
Students learn an important distinction: cartooning and character development often require constructing images from imagination, while perceptual or representational drawing requires careful observation. The skills overlap, but the thought processes are different. Benefit: Helps students understand how they need to think for different kinds of drawing and gives them greater flexibility as artists.
Week 2 — Exterior Linear Perspective: 1-, 2- & 3-Point
Students apply increasingly sophisticated perspective systems to buildings, streets and outdoor environments. Benefit:Gives students the tools to construct convincing architectural spaces from both observation and imagination.
Week 3 — Shading: Direct Light
Students study how a direct light source creates highlights, light planes, transition planes, form shadows, cast shadows and reflected light within shadows. Benefit: Teaches students to understand what light is actually doing so they can create convincing three-dimensional form rather than simply "coloring in" shadows.
Week 4 — Local Tone, Ambient Light & Five-Step Value Scale
Students explore an alternative to direct-light shading based on local tone and ambient light, along with the five-step value scale. A related approach is commonly seen in cartooning and animation as simplified or 2D shading. Benefit: Gives students another practical system for organizing light and dark values and choosing the type of shading appropriate for the artwork they want to create.