Sweeney S.
I was actually invited here via a drawing at random and won a week of free classes. I was sourly disappointed with the offerings here, the free class being elementary level chalk pastel drawing, much too cheap for such a renowned class to offer. They hardly teach you much, and hand you the supplies and a reference, expecting a child of a young age (unlike myself) to be able to extrapolate how to correctly draw what they are seeing. They show off their students' works in the front window, and sometimes, a six year old's watercolor is more professional quality than that of a teenager's oil painting. They refuse to let you use any other type of medium if you are not enrolled, and they limit your amount of creative expression by also limiting what you can draw. They have laminated pieces of paper with cartoon-style animals they hand you to draw, and each is labeled by difficulty. A toucan is too difficult for a ten year old, but a giraffe is too elementary, so here, you may draw a penguin, and nothing else. I wasn't sure what I had expected coming in, having taken classes at OCSA years prior, and with what I had heard from this place, I must've placed my expectations far too high. The bar level for this class was astronomically low, and you are paired with an age group of within ten years of one another. I was 16 at the time of my random class drawing, and I was paired with children of the ages of around seven to nine, much younger than myself. I don't want to say that your grade-school child won't enjoy this, but be aware you could spend your money somewhere else that would be much more beneficial than this area. This is a great one week course to keep a child out of the house for an hour and a half, but nothing more than that. It is not the professional quality of other classes, or even private courses.
