About PortPrep

We are a team of professional artists hoping to correct the gap of knowledge that occurs between high-school and College / University applications. Post-secondary programs have gotten increasingly competitive over time, and high-school education has not caught up to this demand, which is why we created PortPrep to properly help students prepare their portfolios for College.

We have also grown over time, and now offer a number of options for younger teens who are still a number of years away from thinking about what education they’d like to pursue after high school.

Most of our courses and mentorships are online, but we also offer in-person summer camps and tutoring in Guelph, Ontario and Halifax, Nova Scotia.

We’re very proud of our small size and personal approach as it allows us to create such a flexible, choose-your-own style of learning. We guarantee that whoever you talk to on the phone will also be one of the instructors that also teach the courses.

We believe that education needs to evolve both forwards into the future, and also backwards.

It needs to adapt for the future by using our modern technology to provide education regardless of where you are located in the world. This is an exciting paradigm. It needs to adapt to the future by allowing our young, learning artists to gather and study from the infinite pool of inspirational work to be found online.

However, we also need look towards history, to times that were less-distracted. Where attention spans and instant gratification wasn’t commodified. When hard-work and discipline wasn’t undervalued or outsourced to someone else. We need to remember the value of mining deeply into a skillset and learning everything there is to know about it. We need to remember the rare skills and habits that come with classical, artistic training.

At PortPrep we are training our students to be digital craftspeople. Harnessing the power of new technology with the gifts that it brings, while being deeper connected to artists’ roots by embracing challenge while enjoying the craftsmanship involved.

Absolutely. While we are based in Ontario and Nova Scotia, most of what we offer is available as online classes with direct feedback with our instructors. Don’t worry about what time zone you are in, we will always be able to find a time to meet. The scheduling is very flexible. In a Group class, everyone gets to vote on the available times to meet. In an Individual, one-on-one class with our instructor, you can simply pick a time on our calendars to meet.

Have a look at our map on our home page to get a sense of where our students come from (spoiler: it’s everywhere!).