Studio Stories
Projects taught and lessons learned from two
art teachers, sisters and art studio owners
Welcome to our little blog!
When considering how to celebrate our 10yrs of Little Art House, we realized it’s time to get some of our stories down. From the early days to now, we have learned SO MUCH, seen some things, had some amazing art projects and some serious flops. Through it all, we’ve grown as art teachers, sisters, and business partners. It’s our community and shared experiences that have made it so incredibly special and motivates us to keep imagining, exploring and creating at Little Art House :)
We hope to create with you soon!
- Emma and Leighton
Beyond Our Studios.
Partnerships and Third Party Location with Little Art House.
From the beginning, we’ve wanted to provide our services in as many areas of Nashville as possible. Art for All isn’t just about age, skill level, or interest. It’s part of our mission to help make art accessible as possible. This has taken us down many different avenues, like offering camps @ USN where we got our start and continue with camps today , founding our non-profit Little Art House Foundation to offer free/reduced services where it’s most impactful and third party locations like The Getalong where we offer classes and camps year round!
From Two Teachers to a Whole Team!
Learn more about how we went from being a couple of public school art teachers to business owners with a whole TEAM who make our studios and programs magical!
Summer Camp Themes
One of our favorite parts of summer camps is dreaming up what we'll be doing all each week. Every summer, we review previous themes to choose which to keep and add in new ones. We strive to have new projects regularly but some are just so fun we do them with new groups each summer.
This year’s themes are set and we’ve already been dreaming up the projects! We share more about how we choose our themes, some of our favorites and more in our blog post this week…
Little Art House: Imagine, Explore, Create.
How we decided to on the name, Little Art House, what it means to us and the importance of “Imagine, Explore, Create”.
When we were little, Emma and I would spend hours playing pretend. We would pretend to be the Boxcar children (IYKYK) and pack satchels for our journey in the woods, we’d pretend to be Belle and dance and swing our way around the house to Beauty and the Beast songs, and, of course, we played pretend school. We’d try to take turns as the teacher but being the oldest daughter, I tended to grab that role. Teaching was modeled to us by our mother and grandmother, both public school teachers for a total of almost 50 years between them so we always respected teachers and the process of education. Learning was embedded in our daily life (as our grandmother always says “we’re life long learners”).
10 Years of Summer Camps
As we approach our 10th year of summer camps (whhhaaaattt???), we are reflecting a LOT and have noticed that while some things have changed, so much of the how, why, and what we do still rings true from 2016.
Here are some of the key ideas we had in mind when we started with our first camp in June of 2016 which was themed Explorers Camp and for K-2nd Grade @ USN:
Small groups (In studio it’s 12 max with one lead/one assistant but 8 kids if one lead) so there is more teacher interaction per kiddo
Structured in a way that allows for creative freedom
Fun-focused
Varied use of art mediums
Use of visual Inspiration rather than examples like books!