Teachable Moments in Painting

I've started a new cycle of teaching recently and have been doing workshops on a weekly basis. Every time I teach I am learning as much as my students.
My most recent education involved doing a painting demonstration which seems to be standard practice in the art-teaching field. An instructor starts the class by creating a painting in front of the students. I like to call it "Painting without a Net". When doing so there can be successes, but when failure is met, it is a teachable moment for me and the students. The instructor has time constraints. Demos often do not result in one's best work. The best I can do is tell students where I went wrong in the process and hopefully we all learned from it.
Doing a demonstration well takes time. Frankly the students are usually not interested in spending time watching you paint. They are there to paint themselves, especially if the workshop is only a few hours long.
As a result, I've learned to change my demonstration method. Now I start painting at the same time as the students but tell them when I arrive at a salient point that needs explaining, I invite them over to watch what I do. This way my demonstration is stretched over the length of the workshop. The result is a better painting by me and provides more time for the students to paint. Everyone wins this way.
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