Art education is an important part of any curriculum, even when you’re strictly a math-and-science kind of person. Whether you want to learn more about famous art, try your hand at painting or even enroll in local stained glass art classes in Monterey County, CA, taking an art class can impact your life.
If you’ve been on the fence about whether to try a class, here are some real ways that it will change and even help you:
- Improve your academic or work performance: It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true: taking art classes will improve your academic and work performance. First, it’s a creative outlet, which can help take your mind off everyday stressors. Second, the skills you learn will carry over into everyday life, from finding creative solutions to project management. Who couldn’t use a boost in these areas?
- Work on your fine motor skills: No matter how old you are, art classes help you refine your fine motor skills. Art is a physical and mental endeavor, and teaching your muscles to do the work is an important part of improving.
- Boost your creativity: If your work is particularly uninspiring, art classes can help you boost your creativity. This helps in all areas of life, especially when you think of art as a problem-solving endeavor: how can you use the materials you have to get the end result you want? There’s no set formula—it’s completely up to you.
- Learn how to visually analyze work: There’s nothing like trying a skill to learn how to appreciate it more. For example, it’s easy to passively admire stained glass, but once you try your hand at making it, you’ll have a better idea of what it requires and what kind of limitations are involved.
- Keep your confidence up: Finishing an art project (even if you don’t love it as much as you thought you would) is a confidence booster. Proving to yourself that you can do something makes it easier to tackle the next challenge in life.
- Learn perseverance: Speaking of challenges, art often requires perseverance. Most artists spend years—if not their entire lifetime—perfecting their craft. You’ll learn how to keep going until you get the results you want.
- Work on your concentration: Another way art classes can help you is by improving your concentration. It’s all too easy to disappear into a doomscrolling session, get distracted by endless emails and texts and other demands upon our attention. Art classes give you something fun and creative to focus upon—you won’t even miss your phone.
- Collaborate with others: Finally, art classes teach us better ways of collaborating with others. Those skills spill over into work, social interactions, family time and more. Who doesn’t want to try to get along better?