I enjoyed teaching illustration to college students when I was an instructor twenty-five years ago. When I was teaching in the mid-1980’s, I devoted myself to creating demonstrations and I freely shared my techniques.
My teaching opportunity came about due to my mentor, Nancy Ohanian. After I graduated from Cal State Northridge in 1981, I often returned to Nancy’s illustration classes and demonstrated my techniques. Nancy also taught at Cal State Los Angeles. She spoke with the chairman there, and I was given my own class to teach. I taught in a few, different venues. I had courses at UCLA Extension, Otis Parsons Art Institute, Cal State University Los Angeles, and Cal State University, Northridge.
I had no teaching experience, and came up with my own unique assignments and curriculum. It was a wonderful learning experience! I branched out to teaching in other venues, however, I was only a part-time instructor. I taught mostly at night, and continued to work at my free-lance career during the day.
I had to discontinue teaching when I became very involved with my freelance career and challenging children.
Because of the digital age, any course teaching commercial painting techniques would presently be obsolete. There has been significantly less demand for painted/non-digital images and there are very few commissioned assignments anymore. I am able to say that because most of the artist representatives are not in the business anymore either.
My students utilized a multi-step process I developed. By using the same materials I used and following my process, their results were consistently successful.
I had a lot of food artist clones in the making! This translated into excellent assistants working with me on my larger projects through the years. I am still in touch with several of my students, and have some close friendships.
I am going to share a portion of those slides of my students’ work. I’d also like to share are some of my course evaluations, which I recently came across.
It was gratifying to see what an amazing evaluation I was given by my appreciative students. Honestly, I was young and was only a student myself a few years before. Despite my inexperience, my students appreciated me. The highest possible number was a nine, and in some of those classes I had thirty students. I can’t imagine how I pleased everyone.
Clearly from these examples I am sharing, my students really took off with the techniques I shared.
ILLUSTRATING MY LIFE 