ChalkPastel.com

ChalkPastel.com, operating under the brand "You ARE an Artist," is the chalk pastel video art program led by the artist Nana (Lucia Hames) and curated by Tricia Hodges. Since 2010 it has become the default art enrichment in thousands of homeschools that want a low-material, easy-to-join visual-art option that pairs with literature, history, or science rather than standing on its own.

Last updated: 2026-04-24 · Every Homeschool Editorial Team

At a glance

Method	Subject specialist, video-led, literature and unit-study integrated
Worldview	Christian-ecumenical (broadly Christian tone; no doctrinal instruction)
Grades	PreK-12 (family-style, single lesson runs across ages)
Formats	Streaming video, downloadable PDF guides, membership platform
Cost tier	Standard
Parent intensity	2 (supervise materials and playback; no teaching required)
ESA-common	Varies (art enrichment; eligibility depends on state program rules)
Accredited	No
Established	2010 per site footer
Website	chalkpastel.com

Our scoreboard (1-5)

Criterion	Score	One-line reason
Academic rigor	2	Not designed as a formal art curriculum; no technique progression toward a portfolio.
Ease of teaching	5	Press play; Nana teaches; the parent hands out paper and pastels.
Content quality	4	Nana is a warm, capable instructor; lessons are consistent and finishable.
Flexibility	5	Hundreds of lessons; any can be done in any order; family-size license.
Value for money	4	Membership pays off at one lesson a week; material costs are low.
Worldview scope	4	Broadly Christian in tone, non-doctrinal in lesson content; used across worldviews.
Visual/design	4	Clean member portal; video production is simple but effective.
Support resources	4	Companion PDFs, community access, curated pairings to popular curricula.

Who the publisher is

ChalkPastel.com is the art-education project of the Hodges family, operating from Georgia. The site is run by Tricia Hodges, whose blog Hodgepodge predates the membership and remains a feeder channel. The studio instructor is "Nana" (Lucia Hames), Tricia's mother, a working chalk pastel artist who teaches every lesson on camera. The pairing is the core of the brand: Nana provides the art instruction; Tricia packages and distributes it through the site, blog, YouTube channel, and curriculum-pairing guides.

The company launched in 2010, per the ChalkPastel.com homepage footer, initially as a set of free and low-cost video lessons on the Hodgepodge blog. The current Clubhouse Membership model consolidated the catalog into a streaming platform in the mid-2010s. The brand "You ARE an Artist," promoted on the site and YouTube channel, is the umbrella for the full catalog.

ChalkPastel is not a classical art program and does not claim to be. It does not teach art history, drawing-from-life discipline, or a Betty-Edwards-style technique progression. What it does is provide family-style guided lessons in chalk pastel, the medium, through which a child (or an adult, or a family together) can produce a completed piece of recognizable artwork in thirty to forty-five minutes. The business model is volume: hundreds of lessons organized by theme, season, literature tie-in, historical period, and scientific subject, released steadily over a decade and a half.

The core pedagogy

ChalkPastel's method is imitation-based and project-oriented. Each lesson is a twelve-to-thirty-minute video in which Nana works through a single chalk pastel piece, an autumn leaf, a Monet bridge, a dinosaur, a planet, step by step, with the viewer drawing along in real time. The student watches, pauses when needed, and follows. There is no technique curriculum separate from the projects. A student who completes fifty lessons has fifty finished pieces; a student who completes three hundred has three hundred.

The catalog is organized thematically rather than developmentally. Instead of a Level 1 / Level 2 progression, the Clubhouse library groups lessons by literature tie-ins (Narnia, Little House, Harry Potter, classic picture books), history periods (ancient Egypt, medieval, American revolution, Civil War), nature and seasons (bird identification, weather, planets, trees by season), holidays, and composer or artist studies. The curriculum-pairing guide is an important feature: Tricia publishes recommended lesson sets that align with popular homeschool history and literature programs. Story of the World, Beautiful Feet, Ambleside Online, and similar, so families can hand the art slot of a unit study to ChalkPastel without building their own schedule.

Signature mechanics are three. (1) Imitation-and-produce format. Every lesson produces a finished piece; there is no skill-building without immediate output. (2) Low material threshold. A $15-$20 chalk pastel starter set and a stack of cheap construction paper is the entire investment; no brushes, no solvents, no drying time. (3) Family licensing. One membership covers every child in the family plus the adults; there is no per-student tier.

A day in the life

A seven-year-old and a ten-year-old using ChalkPastel as their art slot in a typical week open the Clubhouse on a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon, choose a lesson aligned with the week's history or literature reading, and spend roughly forty-five minutes together at the dining-room table. The parent sets out paper (construction or cardstock), a box of soft chalk pastels, and paper towels for cleanup, then starts the video. Nana introduces the subject, "Today we're going to paint an autumn oak tree", and works alongside the camera, narrating color choices, layering technique ("put the light colors down first"), and smudging and shaping. The children follow, pausing as needed. By the end of the session each child has a finished piece, and the parent has moderated rather than taught.

In families that treat ChalkPastel as a standalone art program, the rhythm runs two to three lessons per week, roughly ninety minutes of art per week. In families that use it as occasional enrichment paired with a history or literature unit, the rhythm is once per week or less. Either rhythm works; the catalog is deep enough to support daily use for years without repeat.

What they do exceptionally well

Low-friction implementation. Nana's instructional voice is warm, unhurried, and confident. Children follow along because the task is clear and achievable. The parent does no pre-reading, no lesson planning, and no clean-up beyond shaking out the paper. For a family where the art slot has otherwise gone unfilled, ChalkPastel closes the gap in a way no craft box subscription and few formal art curricula manage.

Curriculum pairing. The catalog is organized to slot into the popular homeschool history, literature, and science sequences. A family running Story of the World Volume 1 can find a matching ChalkPastel lesson for nearly every chapter. This integration is rare among art programs and is the primary reason the Clubhouse holds members through multiple years of the catalog.

Confidence-building. Our editorial view is that ChalkPastel's single most valuable effect is that children who use it consistently stop saying "I can't draw." The medium, chalk pastel, forgives mistakes through smudging and overlayering, and the lesson format produces a recognizable piece on the first attempt. A child who completes ten Nana lessons generally believes they can produce a piece of artwork, which is the precondition for any more demanding art program that follows.

What they do poorly

No technique progression toward a portfolio. ChalkPastel does not teach drawing from life, proportion, perspective, color theory as a discipline, or chalk pastel technique as an art-school sequence would treat it. A student who completes three hundred Nana lessons has three hundred finished pieces; they do not have a developing artistic technique in a form recognizable to a college portfolio reviewer. Families with a student aiming at serious high school or college-level visual art should treat ChalkPastel as gateway enrichment, not as the program.

Chalk pastel only. The entire catalog is single-medium. Students wanting watercolor, oil, acrylic, printmaking, or sculpture need a separate program. ChalkPastel's sister product Fine Arts Academy widens the medium range at a higher price point, but the main Clubhouse is chalk pastel.

Doctrinal framing is light enough to feel indefinite. The program describes itself as broadly Christian in tone, and the Hodges family's Christian identity is visible on the blog and in some lesson introductions. But the catalog itself is not doctrinally organized, there are no Scripture-memory lessons, no catechism art tie-ins, no theological art-history. Families seeking explicitly Christian art instruction may find the tone warm but the content neutral; families seeking explicitly secular art instruction may find the tone slightly more Christian than advertised. The fit is genuinely broad but not doctrinally defined.

Who it fits / who it doesn't

• Pick ChalkPastel if: you want a low-friction family-style art program that produces finished pieces in thirty to forty-five minutes; you run a literature-based, unit-study, or Charlotte Mason-adjacent core and want art to slot into it; you have younger children and want the whole family to do art together; you want to keep materials costs low; you prefer a broadly Christian but non-doctrinal tone.

• Skip ChalkPastel if: you have a high-school student aiming at serious visual art and need technique progression and multi-medium instruction; you want explicitly classical drawing-from-life training; you want a secular program with no Christian framing at all; you need art history instruction rather than studio practice; you dislike chalk pastel as a medium (it is dusty and single-use).

Cost honest assessment

The Clubhouse Membership as of April 2026 starts at approximately $40 per month for full Clubhouse access, with a Simple Start tier at around $30 per month covering a narrower catalog. Annual billing discounts are offered periodically; the exact annual figure fluctuates with the current sale. Material costs are minimal, a soft chalk pastel starter set runs $15-$20 and a supply of construction paper another $10, sufficient for a full year of family use.

Compared to Masterpiece Society (roughly $20-$30 per month for monthly art lessons across multiple media) and to Artistic Pursuits (around $50-$60 per volume for a print curriculum), ChalkPastel sits mid-range, more than a textbook, less than a multi-medium platform. A family using the Clubhouse one lesson a week extracts value comparable to a paid weekly art class at a fraction of the cost. Whether the spend is right depends on whether the family will actually use the catalog.

ESA eligibility notes

ChalkPastel is a subscription digital service offering art enrichment. ESA eligibility varies by state. Art subscriptions are permitted in Arizona ESA, Utah Fits All, and Florida Step Up in most cases where the program is documented as an educational curriculum. States that restrict digital-subscription categories or that require specific standards alignment may treat ChalkPastel differently. The publisher does not operate a state-specific ESA portal; families pay the membership fee directly and submit invoices. Because the brand is broadly Christian rather than explicitly doctrinal, state programs that restrict "sectarian" content typically do not flag ChalkPastel.

Alternatives

• Masterpiece Society (Alisha Gratehouse), a family would choose Masterpiece Society over ChalkPastel for a broader medium range (watercolor, acrylic, mixed media), a Christian tone similar in warmth, and a lower monthly price point.
• Artistic Pursuits, a family would choose Artistic Pursuits over ChalkPastel for a print curriculum with art-history integration, multi-medium projects, and a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.
• Atelier Art Curriculum (Arts Attack), a family would choose Atelier over ChalkPastel for a classical technique progression with drawing-from-life instruction, developmentally sequenced across grade levels.

How we verified this

Our editorial team reviewed the ChalkPastel.com homepage, the membership page, the product catalog, the Hodgepodge blog, and the YouTube channel run by Tricia Hodges. We cross-referenced against Cathy Duffy Reviews, published homeschool-community comparisons of art programs, and the pricing shown on the live membership page. Prices and program details verified April 2026.