SPRING WORKSHOP: Rome 2019

ROME

Drawing Workshop, spring 2019

What I learned as a Teacher?

1. Observation: Easy to teach, difficult to learn because regards Concentration, that is an important part of the human Intelligence. If you improve your Concentration, without being distracted from other thoughts (mainly: too much goals, daily commitments, bad feelings etc) you will immediately establish the base of your sketch, resolving problems before starting to draw.

2. Goals: One clear goal is much much better than many.
If you are teaching how to give Volume, how to improve the Silhouette, how to choose your color palette, just concentrate all the effort on this goal, pushing your students to not be distracted by other difficulties they will encountered during the process!
This is essential to reach the success!

3. Appeal and Balance: Every exercise could be boring if you don't spice up, adding an interesting way to proceed and a challenge.
Balance_Anyway, if the subject or the task is too complicated, students could be confuse and discouraged. Just balance it, choosing a simple perspective, if the exercise regards how to use value or color, or an intriguing view if the exercises aims to create interesting distortion.
Spice it up_Are you teaching how to synthesize the complexity of "that impossible 17th century church facade"? Give them a short amount of time to finish it, or
Do you want to push your student to create more dynamic sketches? Let them draw people in real life, telling him to exaggerate their action as if they were drawing theater actors, etc.

4. Know your goal as a teacher. Well, that's nothing new, but you need to create a certain empathy with your student and know exactly why you want to teach.
You can't be the best friend of the student, neither the student is your son. You have that "middle role" between the know and unknown (always regarding your skills), you have the duty to transmit your knowledge so that the student can grow on his own.
A Teacher must demonstrate sureness and honesty in the same time:
Sureness: you can help your student to give him a good structured base where he can feels confident
and at the same time you must be honest.
Honest: if you don't know something you have to admit that, but nonetheless, try to find a solution to help him according to you skill.

Teaching help you to improve:
-Concentration and Observation (intelligence);
-Clear communication of a concept (intelligence);
-Create better relation with other, knowing better yourself (empathy);
-Help others to grow on their own (empathy)
and much more...

Tell me about you experience as a teacher, what you learn about it and what you want to improve!