I signed up to take the Artist correspondence course through the Penn Foster Career School. I was excited about taking the course. The description of the various modules offered sounded great. I got my first packet of material containing two very thin books with black and white pictures for the Color Theory module. However, I also received color cards that matched the black and white pictures in the book. As I received more material for later lessons, I noticed how cheap the art equipment was; a drawing pad with no cover and lower quality paper, a couple of drawing pencils, and so on.
I found it amusing that the many Back to the Drawing Board exercises require that you use art tools which do not even come with the course.
Penn Foster claims to have such great Instructors. However, I had trouble understanding the lesson on Perspective and I wrote an email asking for more clarification. You'd think that this great Instructor would provide additional information from his or her artistic background.instead I got an email response two days later saying that Penn Foster didn't have any additional material covering perspective but here are a few web sites to check out. (I did visit the web sites and the information was basically the same as in the booklet I received.) It was then that I realized that the support I was supposed to receive during my course was probably going to be minimal.
I recently sent another email asking if I could switch to another course, although I'm not sure why. They said I would have to cancel the Artist program first and pay $185 which seems a little steep considering how I haven't even finished Module 2 out of 8 modules. Plus the $185 is in addition to what I've already paid on the course.
When I see how cheap the materials are for this course, I figure I could take that same $600 and create my own course and/or take courses offered at Michaels or my local Art Center. I didn't sign up for the course to earn the certificate in the end; rather, I just wanted to learn more about art and it seemed like an good way to go with Penn Foster.
Perhaps other students have had successful stories with Penn Foster. It is very difficult to tell considering the small amount of testimonials offered.
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