Smithsonian Associates Online Programs

Beginning students explore watercolor techniques and learn new approaches to painting through demonstration, discussion, and experimentation.

Inspired by bold sentiments and big wishes, create cards for most events on your calendar. Attention is given to card construction, sentiments, a bit of ink blending, and water coloring with dye-based ink.

This course examines fundamental concepts of composition and their practical application in studio art practice, offering participants tools to enrich their work as well to analyze and appreciate visual art in general. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

In an artist-led series designed to provide a tranquil midday break, create small but satisfying works of art as a way to hit “pause” and incorporate a bit of creativity into your at-home routines.

This introductory course teaches the basic skills needed for drawing. Working with a variety of materials and techniques, including charcoal and pencils, students explore the rendering of geometric forms, volume, and perspective, with an emphasis on personal gesture marks.

Printmaking using a gel plate offers many options for combining materials, tools, and techniques to achieve an array of effects on both paper and fabric. Beginning with basic acrylic paints, explore the possibilities for layering with stamps, stencils, inks, and acrylic paint markers.

Experiment with painting styles such as Cubism, Suprematism, and Abstract Expressionism to learn practical applications of the concepts and techniques of Modernism. Move beyond the basics to discover and develop your unique visual language. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Designed for beginners who want to learn how to use their digital or mirrorless camera as a creative tool, this class gives students the opportunity to learn about technical aspects of photography so they can concentrate on composing beautiful images.

Inspired by the letters in her new book, Joyce Carol Oates: Letters to a Biographer (Akashic), Joyce Carol Oates, in a conversation with author and educator Rebecca Boggs Roberts, discusses her writing process and style over the past four decades. The letters in the book were part of a correspondence with a graduate student who eventually became her biographer.

For centuries, dictionaries were works of almost superhuman endurance produced by people who devoted themselves for years, even decades, to the wearisome labor of corralling, recording, and defining the vocabulary of a language. Educators and authors Bryan A. Garner and Jack Lynch share the stories behind these great works of scholarship and the people who produced them, including towering figures of English lexicography such as Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, and the Oxford English Dictionary’s James Murray, as well as more obscure dictionary makers whose achievements are no less fascinating.