About

Greetings!

I’m Stephanie, founder of Picassa’s Palette Art Education Resources, and author of this blog.

I like to smile, (“smiling is my favorite”), and I once had a coworker tell me, “Stephanie, you live in a fantasy world”  and my reply was, “Yes, I sure do!”

I answered that way not because life is always all butterflies and rainbows (it so isn’t), but because I love showing how happy I am to be following my passion for teaching and creating art.

When I hear, “fantasy world” I think of fairy tales.

So here’s mine:

Once upon a time, there was a girl who dreamed of making art with little humans. She painted and drew and taped collages to every space possible on the walls of her bedroom.

She went on to college, studied Elementary Education and became a classroom teacher of first, and later fourth graders. 

Her passion for making never quite faded during that time, as she could be found hours after school let out, making colorful collages on her classroom door and filtrating art into every possible math, writing and reading lesson.

Fast forward a few years later, and that girl who had become an adult, had almost lost sight of her once colorful world.  Her head spun with a dizzying haze of standardized testing scores, state assessment statistics, and the pressures of a high stakes interventions, leaving little room for art-centered creativity. 

She longed for a change to put the shine back into her life. She needed to find the end of the rainbow!

So, she decided to follow her heart to become an Art Teacher and her teaching luster slowly returned as her passion refocused on her teacher heart’s true raison d’etre- creating things with kids. 

In fact, I spent a decade doing exactly that, as a career. However during those years, I felt a calling that I couldn’t quite place.

Finally, in 2022, I listened to my heart and followed its direction toward a broader impact by providing assistance to other teachers, via more visibly placing the education resources I’ve created out into the world, but this time, FULL time. 

Now, I work from home and focus upon creating more resources while I spread the word about their availability.

I want you to know that I truly love teaching, just as much as I love living my life when I’m not teaching. I want to help other Art Teachers do the same…

I want to help you save your precious time planning, so you can LIVE yours AND teach, too. 

As teacher artists who teach many grade levels with varying ages and abilities, the dedication to meticulous planning of lessons takes SO much time.

We love it, in SO MANY ways… but MY GOODNESS, it takes SO much energy!

And then, once we are spent, what do we have left to give when we are teaching art to the people!?

So, let me help you save your planning time, and the mental energy that it takes with it.

By having the right resources available to teach art (that you’d otherwise probably spend hours making from scratch) – the work hours and mental capacity you used to spend on planning, can now be put toward YOUR heart’s true purpose– that which you love:

… to ACTUALLY teach

… and dare I say, to also LIVE your life?!

I know art teachers may not get paid much, but if the currency were hugs and smiles, then we’d be truly rich.

So let’s get you back to earning MORE by putting our energy BACK INTO that very limited face-to-face time we get with our students.

HAPPY TEACHING!

Artfully yours,

Stephanie