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During my 21 years of teaching art and craft in secondary colleges in Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria, I have constantly heard hot discussion on what constituted art and what was craft. Questions fly around: is painting fine art? Is craft really art? The answer often depended on what medium the debater was using when expressing their own creativity.

I made the distinction thus: art is when you generate an image, idea, concept or design using your creative skills; and craft is the medium that you choose to express your creative design with. Craft includes painting in various mediums, sculpture, ceramics, fabric, photography etc.

Those who believe that Art should simply come from a deep seated soul and simply burst forth, using whatever is at hand to create it, may have trouble with my definition.

Another regular question I get asked is Can you teach creativity? My response is yes. Of course there are people more skilled than others and some have greater natural abilities than others. But basically, creativity can be taught.

My experience with teaching is that the more structured you are, the greater the creative skills become. I no longer believe that you simply have to express yourself, whenever and however you wish. Those who are prepared to build on basic skills such as observations, drawing, colour, and tone, will more quickly come to a creative solution to a problem.

And that brings me to another point. If you have a problem to solve, you not only are more likely to be creative, but you can also expect more satisfaction from your endeavours. So how do you find a problem when all you want to do is paint a picture? Van Gogh certainly had a problem he wanted to solve. He wanted to capture the aggressive movement of light and colour in an ever changing landscape of wind and rain and dust. He did not go out simply to paint a landscape, he wanted to solve a problem.

I think this is the biggest dilemma of teaching art in schools. Teachers try to teach a skill such as ceramics or silk printing, but the results are often most unsatisfactory because students were not given a problem to solve.

Let me give you an idea of what I mean. I wanted to teach a class to use air brush to create a strong design image on a large canvas. They were not told what the medium was going to be. First of all I collected a large number of balls and had the students draw groups of balls for 4 hours (over two weeks). This was their research. I specifically made them aware of drawing the negative space (background) as well as the positive space (the actual balls).

Once the research was completed I gave them the problem to solve. They had to create a design using two colours only which emphasised the negative space. The best designs came from those students who began to treat both the positive space (the balls) and the negative space (the background) as abstract shapes. By using a light box, they got the shapes more and more simplified until a truly beautiful and creative balance of two colours was achieved. The final job was the craft, the airbrush and tape technique.

So,is craft, art? Well, I do not think so, as I see a lot of good craft with no real art awareness. But I do believe for you to be successful and produce worthwhile work you have to marry both art and craft in a sensitive and insightful end product of your Work of Art.

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Source by Barbara Gabogrecan

Pop Art was an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950’s in Britain, and in the late 1950’s for the United States. The British artists were the product of the independent group (IG), formed in 1952. The members resisted the institute’s commitment to modernist art, design and architecture. It was the Americans however that really gave increased awareness and success in the Pop Art movement.

Pop Art used the visual commodities of popular culture within the movement of fine art. English Critic Lawrence Alloway used the term ‘pop’ as art that made use of objects, materials and technologies from mass culture, to bring out the yields of the industrial society. It was characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture; such as comic books, packaging, advertising, television and film.

Pop Art evolved at a crucial time in society, post World War II, which saw an enormous economic growth. This was the beginning of commercial manipulation, celebrities and exhibitionism. It wanted to bring art back to the people in their everyday lives, working with simple everyday objects.

Around 1962 Pop Art established itself as a serious recognized art form. It marked the end of modernism and the beginning of the postmodern era. It merged the divide between the fine arts with the media and advertising commercial arts; a divide that had been prominent for hundreds of years. Pop Art soon became one of the biggest movements of the 20th Century. It was beautiful, polished and glamorous, even though it was mass produced on a low budget; it caught the changes in society perfectly.

Andy Warhol was one of the biggest American Pop Artists around. It was Warhol’s paintings that made him so famous worldwide. His painting of Campbell’s soup tins which was used commercially has become extremely well known. As well as his screen-print of Marilyn Monroe which depicts Warhol’s own insight on American fame.

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Source by Louise Gandolfi

Shading is the technique of showing tones or values on an object through gradual gradations for it to look ‘solid’ and have a three dimensional effect. Shading techniques allow you to weave layer upon layer of pencil marks to add a convincing form to your line drawing. Shading adds a sense of substance to your subject and produces a convincing tonal relationship. Drawings take on a three dimensional form when shaded properly.

To render shades correctly on drawn objects, the artist must carefully observe the source of light that is striking various values of tones or shades on the drawn objects. After realizing the source of light, the artist must study closely the reflections of the light on areas of the objects to know the lightest and darkest sections. After establishing the endpoints or extremes thus the lightest valued areas as well as the darkest valued areas, the remaining area with a mid-half tone between the two extremes is the middle value.

The tones are adjusted as many times to make it look realistic. It is advised that artists step back periodically to look at the drawing and the subject in a distance to view and adjust the tones accordingly. This would make the values depicted on the drawn objects more realistic. In the rendition of cast shadow, the artist must take note of the light source and the striking or reflection of the light on the objects. If the light is far above, the shorter the shadow is (try checking out your shadow at noon – 12:00PM) whereas the lower the light, the longer the cast shadow will become. The rule is that the darker the shadow, the brighter the light source. As the shadow is drawn further from the object, the lighter it becomes. The shadow takes on the shape of the item it comes from. Notice that to make the shadow, all you have to do is create a triangular shape from the top of the object to the ground and back to the base of the object. According to the light source, make your shadow fit accordingly.

There are various ways of rendering shades on a drawn object. Some of these are:

1. Hatching: This is a shading technique that employs one set of line either vertical, curved or horizontal lines in rendering shades on a drawn object. These lines are drawn beside one another to give the illusion of a value. Depending on the hatching shading effect one want to achieve, the artist may decide to make the individual lines in hatching sets far apart or close together.

2. Cross-hatching: This is a shading technique made by the use of lines that crosses each other at an angle in rendering shades on an object. In cross-hatching, one set of line crosses over (overlaps) another set of line to create a shade on a drawn object.

3. Stippling/Dottilism/Pointillism: This is a shading technique that employs dots or series of points in rendering the shades on an object.

4. Circularism/Squirkling/Scribbling: This is the use of circles, squirkles and scribbles in rendering a shade on an object. When squirkle sets have noticeable spaces between the lines, they work beautifully for shading various textures, such as fuzzy fabrics and curly hair. Squirkles can look like a solid tone when the lines are drawn closely together, and are great for shading lots of different aspects of people, including skin tones.

5. Tonal gradation/smudging: This is the rendering of soft tones on a drawn object and blending the tones together with the thumb, a piece of paper or a soft cloth.

Rendering shades on objects using any marking or drawing tool is an interesting practical exercise in art. However, to achieve successes, artists must learn the rudiments in shading so as to render shade on drawn objects based on the accepted rubrics of art.

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Source by Dickson Adom

The importance of Titles in Art is immense, as it gives a meaning and a purpose to the artwork. In fact, the Title of an artwork is one of its most artistic and important things. The meaning of the Title usually is interwoven throughout a piece of art and is often times hard to understand. If the Title of an artwork is not mentioned, it becomes the observer’s challenge to interpret it. All this goes on to emphasize the importance of Titles in art.

Framing an Art Title depends on the type of artistic image you are working on. Make sure that your Art Title is in harmony with the theme of your artwork. The connoisseurs will be able to appreciate an artwork better if they have clarity about what they are looking at. The following are some key importance of Titles in art:

o Art Titles are very convenient handles for analyzing, reviewing, and addressing art.

o Most Art Titles are axiomatic, yet perceptive, inducing one to look a bit deeper.

o Most Art Titles have an intentional play of words that make them interesting.

o Sometimes the Art Titles are needed to convey what a viewer thinks of an image.

o The Art Titles are important as they help people remember the particular piece of art they are attached to.

To arrive at an appropriate Title for an artwork, one should primarily consider its purpose. Artists should seek answers to the following questions in order to frame an apt Title for their artwork:

o Is it a piece of a project with a name?

o Is it just a single shot, or an art form that has caught your attention?

Usually, an artwork should have one or two sets of Titles. The first Title should be a ‘Working Title’ in combination with a File Number. The second Title is derived from the fragments of what you were thinking while making or processing the piece.

Framing a relevant Art Title is as responsible a job as it is important. A wrongly Titled Art can be quite damaging to the perception of artwork. It can lessen the impact of an image, especially when excessively cute Titles are used to depict the image art. In addition, some abstract Art Titles hamper the imagination of a viewer, when it tends to delineate too much or tries to lead in a direction that the art is not supportive of.

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Source by Annette Labedzki

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When looking at the sentence “In Native American rock art, “rock” is more than just an adjective,” I immediately begin to consider why the “rock” in “rock art” might have more meaning to Native Americans. When thinking about the “rock” as only an adjective, I would only see that the type of art is done on rock. The word “rock” allows me to picture the art more clearly in my mind but it is a very limited way of viewing this Native American art form.

Looking beyond “rock” as an adjective, we can find a deeper meaning. First we must ask ourselves “If rock is not just an adjective, what else could it be?”. I think that rock is something important to Native American art because it is the surface upon which they can tell stories and create and preserve images. It is very significant because without the rock, there can be no art. It is the place where the art is done. Rock can be a setting.

Since the rock is essential to the art, I believe it is also essential to the Native Americans who produced the art. The rock is needed for them to tell their stories and express themselves and their culture. Rock is a necessity for cultural expression. Because of its function, I believe that the rock can have an artistic and spiritual value. The Native Americans who selected the specific part of rock on which to do art, made a decision about their composition and the presentation of the art. So the rock that they chose to do art on contains an artistic value.

The rock might also have spiritual value based on what is being depicted and its importance to the Native peoples. Many times, the art being done on the rocks serves more than a purely artistic purpose. It is to tell a story or explain an important idea. I believe that many times, the story or idea is connected to Native religion and spirituality. So creating an image related to Native spiritual beliefs may mean that rock also has some sort of spiritual value.

So besides acting as a descriptor of the type of art being created, the word “rock” in “rock art” can also imply a certain artistic and spiritual meaning related to Native American beliefs. It can also be seen as essential to cultural and artistic expression in Native American culture as well as a setting or canvas for art.

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Source by Shirley H Lee