In 2011, the author made the transition from teaching assistant to teaching artist. From 2007 to 2011 she was an assistant teacher at Marwen, an organization that provides free art classes for middle and high school students in the Chicago area. It was there that she began to realize how much she enjoyed helping people as a teacher, whether formally in the classroom or informally helping peers in her college classes. After assisting more than twenty classes and working with many great teaching artists, she started to develop ideas of how she would run her own classes, and this past summer she felt ready to take the next step to become a full-fledged teaching artist. In this article, the author details her experience in a forty-hour professional development program where the emphasis was on planning and teaching from artistic practice.