Teaching with Templates: How to Create Classes Efficiently (with Delores Naskrent)

Ever wondered how Delores manages to release two full classes a month while also running her business, creating art, and mentoring students? 

In this behind-the-scenes solo episode, she’s pulling back the curtain on her entire teaching workflow — from concept to class launch.

Delores shares how she structures her lessons, designs projects that truly engage students, and reuses smart templates to stay consistent without sacrificing quality. You’ll learn how she:

✨ Starts every class with a clear, purposeful project
 🎨 Refines techniques through repetition and practical experimentation
 🎥 Records short, focused lessons that keep students motivated
 💻 Uses tools like iMovie, Descript, and ChatGPT to streamline her process
 👩‍👧 Collaborates with her daughter to edit efficiently and save time

Whether you’re an artist thinking about teaching online or a creative educator looking to work smarter, not harder — this episode will help you find your rhythm, reuse your structure, and bring more joy into your teaching process.

🎧 Listen now and discover how to make your teaching workflow more sustainable — without losing the creative spark that makes your classes shine.

Transcript

Delores Naskrent: [00:00:00] Hey there, my friends. It's Delores here, and welcome to the podcast. Today's one of those practical behind the scenes episodes where I will walk you through exactly how I teach and create classes quickly and consistently without losing quality. If you have ever wondered how I managed to release two full classes a month for my membership, while also working on my bigger signature courses and doing all of the things for my business, this is the episode where I spill the beans at least about my recording process.

It all starts with, a really simple truth that not every class has to be built from absolute scratch. You can create something truly valuable by reusing the [00:01:00] solid structure. Like what I'm going to describe. A intention and then focusing on what your students need the most. I found a system that works for me, and while it's still a lot of work, it also is what makes this whole teaching thing sustainable and honestly full of joy for me.

Let's start with the number one most important part of any class I create, and that's the project. For me, everything begins with that beautiful, useful piece of art. It might be a pattern, it might be a floral illustration or a greeting card. It could be lettering. Whatever fits the topic that I'm trying to share with my audience.

That project is the anchor for the whole class, and it's what keeps me focused, and more importantly, [00:02:00] it's what my students. Can connect with and aim for. I work with a lot of adult learners at this point in my life. I did teenagers for 30 years, but now I am teaching adults and these are people who are learning digital tools like procreate or Affinity Designer because they either wanna speed up their workflow or maybe try something new or maybe start selling their work.

Maybe through print on demand, or art licensing. Who knows? There are so many different ways to use the art once you learn how to do it. So I always design with these people in mind. I'm thinking about how to take a creative concept like maybe texturing or building contrast or cleaning up repeat patterns.

Wrap it all into a fun, achievable project that [00:03:00] builds real skills. Once I've created that first version of the project, I usually do it again. I personally talk about this all the time in my classes, that it's the repetition that makes you improve your skills and catch the technique.

So personally myself, when I'm doing a big project, I aim to make at least, between five and 10 artworks based on the same technique. Sometimes I try several variations because it's the process of repeating the artwork and the techniques that help me notice where the tricky parts are.

That's things that I struggle with maybe specifically, or I find that there might be a shortcut that might help, so I take note of that so that I can repeat that in the class at some point to [00:04:00] show how to troubleshoot or how to do something more easily. Or sometimes what it does teach me is that I need to break something down even further while I'm creating. As I'm doing those little projects and repeating them, I'm also mentally building the class. I'm not really big on outlining the whole thing and putting it down on paper. I usually just kind of go for it, but it's only because I've been repeating the project a couple times that I'm able to do it that way.

As I'm working on the project, especially after I've done it, let's say for the third time I'm asking myself, what's the sequence? What's the easiest way to explain this? What parts do I want to highlight with examples? It's, kind of like reverse engineering the teaching as I create the art.[00:05:00] 

Once I feel solid about the process, I start building the class using a simple structure that I reuse every time, and it's not rocket science, honestly. Like I said, I don't write extensive scripts or notes or outlines. I generally start by just recording. The different lessons. I usually break it down into five or six or maybe seven core lessons.

Sometimes I'm recording and I see that I'm getting close to the, 10 to 15 minute mark, and I just break that lesson and say what I'm gonna cover in the next lesson. I try to keep each of them focused on one part of the process. Sometimes the finishing will go into a second lesson and so on and so on until I have the whole project done.

[00:06:00] And a lot of times that takes five or six lessons. And finally, closing thoughts, video where I wrap things up. Sometimes I'm showing mockups or alternate versions of the project. Like I said, I always try to keep each lesson under 15 minutes, partly because that's what. Students prefer 15 minutes of recording usually breaks down to about a 10 minute class, and partly it's because I know Teachable has a limit of about 15 minutes.

If I'm a little bit over a 15 minute video, it's too big for. My upload teachable. So I either have to reduce its quality or go back and edit some more. So generally, I try to stick under that in my first try because I don't wanna have to go back and do that editing. So that time limit actually really helps to keep me focused too.

And let's be honest, most of us don't wanna sit through a 40 minute lesson [00:07:00] anyways. I personally don't. I find that what I'm watching classes, that 10 to 15 minutes is, you know, way more than I need to do for a lot of the explanations. I mean, there's sometimes I go over, but 10 minutes is. To me, the sweet spot for both teaching and attention span.

Some people like to stop at the end of the lesson and do the lesson. I've found that other students like to watch the entire class once and then go back and go through each of the lessons and stop wherever they need to create the project. Once I've mapped out all the lessons. It's time to jump into editing, and this is where things really speed up for me because I've set up a pretty smooth system.

I personally use iMovie. It's not the fanciest, but it's free. Simple, and does exactly what I need. I [00:08:00] kind of have a base template already saved that includes a title and, ending slide with a little bit of a animated arrow, you know, that shows you that you're gonna be moving on to the next lesson.

I have the music attached to those two, so that's the basis of all of my videos and timelines in iMovie. At that point, I've created the project, so I create a title slide for that class. Probably using Photoshop or whatever tool is handy. I've done it even in procreate or in Affinity Designer.

Depends where I'm working on that project at that time. These two things bookend each video and they help everything look really cohesive. So that's the basic structure. Then I drag in, each of the videos that I create, [00:09:00] those are usually recorded using my iPhone straight above my iPad on a really simple overhead setup, stand.

I think I bought for under $50 on Amazon. After recording each of the videos, I airdrop them immediately to my Mac and I put it into the folder for that class. I have a folder within the folder that's all the videos. I'll take that video and drag it right into the timeline and iMovie and I go through that process for each of the lessons until the whole class is recorded and laid out on the timeline.

Once I've got everything in place. I hand the editing over to someone special. My daughter Ché, I actually taught her video editing back in high school, if you can believe it. And now she's become my go-to rough editor. She takes the [00:10:00] videos that I've put on the timeline, she gets the entire iMovie file and she goes through the videos and handles that very first round of cleanup, which is.

Usually things like trimming up dead space, think syncing things up if they need to be, and sometimes adding things like basic zooms or placeholders, maybe explanations where I might wanna add a highlight later. You know, just little things like just organizing the file and making it as short as possible at that point.

So taking out a lot of the dead time and. Filler words that I use if you haven't noticed. I do use filler words a lot like so and long ands so she trims all that stuff out and all my breathing or any of the sounds that happen to come up on the soundtrack, she's come to recognize them on the soundtrack and so she could do that really quickly.[00:11:00] 

It is been such a gift to work with her in this way. We both love it. She so appreciates the extra money and I so appreciate the time that it saves me. It's definitely worth it. By the time I get the class back from her, I usually just need to listen through and maybe add an arrow here and there or a zoom in, or draw some attention to a specific spot and then it's good to go.

One of the things that I forgot to add there just before I send it to her, is that a lot of times before I give it to her, I get all of the soundtracks for the classes still in their rough, rough state. And that's where I've developed another time saver. And this one is something that I have only started using in the last.

I don't know, maybe four or five months. I export that audio from iMovie and use a tool called [00:12:00] Descript to transcribe it. And then I take and run that transcript through a prompt that I've developed for chat GPT. So it doesn't do any writing for the class for me, but what it does is it helps me turn that raw transcript into the titles that I need.

So I use it to brainstorm better lesson titles. I might have figured out roughly titles for it, but I ask it to give me better lesson titles that. Describe a little bit better what I have done in each lesson, I try to have it do seven words because that's specifically what I need to fit nicely on my title slide.

I also, do a title slide for each lesson, so that's something that I will do in Photoshop or whatever program I'm working in, and also drag those into the timelines and replace those initial ones that I had there as [00:13:00] placeholders. I also use ChatGPT to write a short summary for each video. Sometimes I can get it to give me a much better class name.

If my original title isn't perfect, I still choose and edit everything myself. But it saves me hours of time with copywriting. 'cause I used to have to write. All of those little lesson descriptions myself, I would stop right after recording the lesson and I would immediately write down a couple of notes as to what would be in that lesson, and that would be the information that goes under each lesson when you're actually in my classes.

So this has saved me a lot of time and really, in my opinion, gives me that extra perspective when I'm. A little bit too close to the content. It does a better job of summarizing what will be learned in the lesson, and then that's what I use to create the script, and then that script [00:14:00] I go through and. Put on my teleprompter and then read out all of those intros.

That becomes the intro to my class and the intro to each of the lessons. A section of it becomes the conclusion to the class. So the closing thoughts that I usually put in. So all of these steps, editing templates, reusing lesson structures. Smart writing support.

They let me teach more efficiently without losing the heart of what I do, and that's what I really want to emphasize today. Not every class has to be this massive, original, perfectly constructed masterpiece. What your students need most is clarity, structure, and. A project that they're excited to work on.

Like they look at the project and think, yeah, I wanna do that. It's really okay to build a series of classes that break down big ideas into [00:15:00] smaller, digestible pieces. I can't tell you how many times I've had students say to me, oh, by the way, you can do such and such and such by doing blah, blah, blah, and it's something that I do teach in another class, but I have broken it down into small, digestible pieces and I don't wanna throw the whole book at them right at the beginning. I think personally, that's how people actually learn best is by learning one thing at a time than building a little bit more onto it. And I try not to cram everything into one course.

I think about that long arc of learning. I give people. The strong first step, and then I invite them back for the next one. And if you're someone who's thinking about teaching online or already doing it and wondering how to keep up, this is your reminder. Just start simple. Use what works. Build from your [00:16:00] strengths, reuse your structure.

Save your energy for the creativity that matters most to you and your students. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today. I don't know if I've ever actually shared this whole process. If you found this helpful at all, I'd love to hear from you. Come and say hi in the community, or tag me on Instagram at Delores Art Canada.

You can find a couple of links here in the show notes, and you've got this. If you ever decide to teach even just one class, I'll be there cheering you on. I just had a student post a new class on YouTube for the very first time. Jasmine Goodwin. I'm so proud of her. She did a wonderful job, and I just wanna tell all of you to keep creating, keep juggling, and most importantly, keep finding joy in the process. [00:17:00]