Isabella De Matteo Teaching Portfolio

Isabella De Matteo is an artist and educator from New York that graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from The Cooper Union in 2019. She has three years of teaching experience with The Saturday Program at Cooper Union within the Portfolio Preparation class.

Field Trips + Studio Visits

Museum of Natural History Scavenger Hunt

For Thanksgiving it is tradition to take the students to the Museum of Natural History to go on a drawing scavenger hunt. Whichever team of students finds and draws the most species wins first pick at prizes!

Nyeisha showing off her fabulous prize and sketchbook!

Class holding their sketchbooks after a long day of drawing.

Miguel Luciano

Jack Whitten

Ronny Quevedo

Lucia Hierro

Anton Van Dalen

Miscellaneous Lessons

BIG Charcoal Drawing Day

Each year our class created large scale charcoal drawings of the same object for the entire day. These are the drawings that make way into the final exhibition to show the students, their parents, and the rest of the community what they're capable of.

Window Displays

At The Saturday Program it has always been important to show to students that their voices matter. Pictured here are window displays the students made in reaction to gun violence, the words of our current president, and climate change.

Skeleton / Model Drawing

To prepare the students for applying to college, we created many lesson plans to diversify the students portfolios. Here I am pictured with my co-teacher, Vaughn Lewis, doing a demonstration on how to compose and draw the figure, in this case skeletal! A model was also present on this day to challenge the students to draw from life and still life.

Single Object / Multiple Mediums

Here I am pictured giving advice to a student on her drawings. On this day we used all kinds of materials from pencils to markers to watercolor.

Flags + Chalk Drawings

Both of these images show an example of what the students created on the second to last day of classes and opening of their final exhibition.

Here they replicated famous artworks on Cooper Square using various forms of chalk.

Mono-Printing

In this lesson, students chose from their pick of dried flowers and plants to do monoprints of for the day. It is a great way to show the students that it is always possible to create works that look beautiful and sophisticated without access to expensive equiptment.

Bolt Book

Bolt Books are a Saturday Program tradition that teaching both the possibilities of bookbinding and how to maintain a sketchbooking process!

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