Monart School of Art

The Need for Artists in the Future

Up until the last decade, the world (including us in Houston, Texas) has been divided into two types of thinkers: the right-brained thinkers who tend toward creativity and operating outside the box, and the left-brained thinkers who tend toward rules and structure. These two types of thinkers find themselves at odds as the world moves toward a more open-minded community that combines the two hemispheres of the brain and uses visualization, innovation, and creativity to enhance our lives. The key challenge ahead of all of us is to teach our children to not only be creative, but to be able to put all their incredible ideas on paper in clear, concise, and structured drawings.

Monart School of Art, Houston and Pearland

The Monart method is the most effective way to instill in your children the artistic skills they need to communicate their ideas more effectively and confidently, both on traditional and digital platforms. Since we opened our doors in 2008, our youngest students have boasted increases in confidence and improvements in their fine motor skills. Our older students have developed a foundation for accelerated advancement through their academic and professional careers as they draw and visualize their ideas and school projects more easily than their peers.
Our teaching method was developed by Ms. Mona Brookes and leverages students’ familiarity with basic shapes to help them deconstruct complex images into simpler parts. By connecting concrete shapes and nature, children lay a foundation that serves as a stepping stone toward the more sophisticated world of art lessons often taught in middle school, high school, and college art courses and computer animation/digital illustration courses.

We offer a wide variety of class types including:

– Traditional art classes (broken into age-appropriate levels)
– Animation/manga drawing

– Graphite courses 
– Specialized courses specific to certain media such as oil painting, watercolor, and sketching
– Digital illustration and graphic design
– Computer animation
– Game design and coding
– 3D printing
– Fashion design, drafting, and sewing
– Pottery: Working on the wheel (even kids) and by hand to make ceramics
Please view our schedule for a complete list of courses and times.

Why Monart?

We are conveniently located in Houston, Texas (specifically in the West University and Bellaire area) and Pearland, Texas (specifically in Shadow Creek Ranch), and take our art and computer programs off-site to schools in Houston, Katy, Sugarland, and Stafford.

We are the only school in Houston that teaches using the Monart method. We have expanded on traditional art and have incorporated the use of computers to implement and offer classes in advanced graphic design, digital illustration, computer animation, game design, and coding. We provide Apple laptops and Wacom tablets and styluses to teach our students on software platforms including GIMP, Game Maker, and Sculptris.

Our goal with our computer classes is to teach students on modern, virtual platforms that professional graphic designers, product designers, engineers, and architects use today.

We also offer ceramic and pottery courses, in which students learn to throw vessels on a pottery wheel, hand build, glaze and paint their handmade ceramics. Students ages 6 and older learn to use the wheel, make cylinders, bowls, plates, and vases, and master pottery painting.

The Individualized Learning Process at Monart

Our primary goal with all our classes and camps at Monart is to give our students a skill set they can use throughout their lives and the confidence to use it without hesitation. We offer a variety of art classes, camps, workshops, off-site after-school programs, and private parties to ensure that our students receive the best art training we have to offer.

All of our sessions, whether in a class, camp, workshop, or private party, guide students step-by-step through a path of evolutionary growth in visualization that starts with the five elements of shapes (i.e., straight lines, angle lines, curve lines, circles, and dots) and leads new artists toward curated combinations of shapes that express their unique artistry as their portfolios grow over time. Students find the means toward true, unbound artistic development in our art classes and art camps, which is truly our main goal at Monart.

Our students learn so much more from our age-appropriate and progressive curriculum of art lessons. While there are plenty of books available that teach children how to draw or complete various art projects, our program makes sure to teach students about the subject of their drawing or project at the beginning of the lesson. The benefits of this process are twofold – students become more interested in the subject of their artwork and retain information at nearly eight times the normal rate when they combine learning about a subject and drawing that same subject.
We push our students and campers to toward their potential in the most non-judgmental and encouraging way possible. Art students in our program learn to overcome their limitations little by little with each art lesson and project. Each student’s progress over a 12-week class term (or even just a week-long camp) is easy to see in the bound portfolios of artwork that students take home at the end of each term.

We have seen consistent improvement in all our students and, as our students’ parents and school teachers constantly tell us, the added benefits of:

– Increased confidence
– Better communication skills
– Better hand-eye coordination
– Increased focus and better work ethic
– Better computer and graphic design skills

Our Off-Site Ancillary Programs

in conjunction with TEKS

We are happy to work with schools to design an individualized curriculum specific to your school’s needs and events. Currently, we offer programs to the schools listed below:

– Amigos Por Vida: Ancillary art program
– DAV Montessori: Ancillary and after school programs

If you’d like to see Monart at your school, please email us at info@houstonmonart.com.

Where are Monart Students Now?

We have a long list of success stories of accomplished alumni from the Houston Monart program. A considerable number of graduates from our art classes and art camps have been accepted into top art programs including the prestigious High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA) and various college programs. Many of our students have also won art competitions in their own schools and been featured in other competitive exhibitions like the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo School Art Program.