The experience of running my first art workshop taught me more about my own practice than anything except actually making art.

Teaching forces articulation. You can have strong intuitions about why something works or doesn't work in a painting, but if you can't articulate it clearly to someone who doesn't share those intuitions, you don't understand it as well as you think you do.

The questions students asked that I couldn't immediately answer became my study material. 'Why does this shadow color work but this one doesn't?' forced me to examine color temperature at a level of precision I'd been operating intuitively.

The most useful workshop format I've found: live demonstration with narration. Drawing or painting while explaining what you're doing and why — out loud, in real time — is the highest-quality teaching for visual skills because it connects the visual result to the decision that produced it.