Kick-ass drawing teacher on Seattle's Eastside?

tomcam

Our 13 year-old daughter is a promising artist. She does people pretty well: traditional, anime, chiba, steampunk. She's also very good with words.

We're looking for a very high quality drawing teacher on Seattle's Eastside: Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Sammamish. Ideally that teacher would be willing t come to our house. Thought would be to speed up our daughter's grasp of the basics such as shapes, shading, anatomy, and so on.

Can anyone point me to s super-good teacher in our area?

Angel_of_Bacon

You might try talking to some of the atelier-style schools in your area (I don't know the Seattle area, so these may or may not be out of the way)- these are schools that have a particular focus on traditional, foundational drawing skills.

http://www.gageacademy.org/index.php

http://www.georgetownatelier.com/

I haven't been to either of these schools myself so I don't have any first hand knowledge of them (other than one of Gage's teachers, Juliette Aristides, has written a very good book on traditional drawing methods). I can see they also have some youth programs, which may be what you're looking for.

Now, this kind of class training may be a little more intense than what you and/or your daughter are looking for right at the moment, but I might suggest calling/visiting these places and seeing if any of their students would be interested in taking up a tutoring role; that way you could get someone that might be more flexible in how and what they teach as opposed to a class, while still making sure that she's being given solid fundamental information.


Of course, this all kind of depends on what you consider a 'kick-ass drawing teacher'- this is coming from the 'will they teach fundamental drawing skills effectively', and not necessarily from a 'are they good with kids' perspective (which obviously depends on the personality of the teacher in question, which you'll have to audit yourself).

Personally, (anecdotal experience incoming), I'd try to err on the skills side; having been through a university art school, the impression I got was that a lot (I won't say all) of the people looking to go into teach art to youths were never the most skilled or motivated people when it came to actually producing art- their passion was really more in the 'being a teacher in a classroom' bit.

Which is a great motivation to have, and it'll come in handy in trying to wrangle 25 kids into behaving themselves adequately for the duration of a class period... but for an individual student looking to seriously improve their skills, that kid will see right through that teacher and realize pretty quickly that they don't have much to offer them (a lot of the time because the teacher just doesn't know anything, having only ever been taught by teachers that also don't know anything).

For that kid, what's going to matter is, does she respect the teacher as an artist? Does she look at the teacher's work and say, "I'd like to do that, please show me how it's done, how did you learn to do that"? (Beware most art teachers, who don't demonstrate or show their own drawings). It's tremendously motivating and humbling to see someone really good at drawing at work- far more so than the efforts of someone who just keeps students busy.

At least, that's been my experience and just my own personal opinion- different strokes for different folks and all that- so obviously you and your daughter should work out what you think is the best option for her. I'm just hitting you from the perspective of a (now professional) artist who spent a lot of years frustrated by high school and college art teachers having little to offer, before going to an atelier with actual knowledgeable ones- so I think it is fantastic that you're seeking out specifically good art instructors this early on, it's something I wish my parents had done for me (particularly having seen the work of people that have had that kind of experience...it seems a lot of them grow to become seriously phenomenal.)