Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning offers a deep insight and comprehension of the world of Art. Contents: What is Art? The Structure of Art Significance of Materials Used in Art Describing Art - Formal Analysis, Types, and Styles of Art Meaning in Art - Socio-Cultural Contexts, Symbolism, and Iconography Connecting Art to Our Lives Form in Architecture Art and Identity Art and Power Art and Ritual Life - Symbolism of Space and Ritual Objects, Mortality, and Immortality Art and Ethics

From FirehousePublications.com comes the elementary version of our bestselling book, The Art Student's Workbook. This elementary version was created by a 20+ year certified veteran teacher and curriculum writer for classes in drawing, painting and sculpture designed for grades three through eight. The lessons are broad and easily adjusted to accommodate different grade levels, special needs students, and material appropriate for many environments from the school classroom, or home based instruction, to a fine arts camp program. It includes nearly three years worth of lesson ideas in painting, drawing, sculpture, and clay, project samples, vocabulary, worksheets, sample tests, research paper samples, grading rubrics, sketch and note taking pages, and short creative five minute writing assignments, critiquing pages, and daily closure statements to meet district observational requirements. This book is also a helpful aid in fulfilling State and Federal accommodation requirements (504/ IEP) by providing special needs students additional documented and written material that may be taken home. Every lesson is designed to be personal and expressive fine art. There are NO "crafty" projects or "cookie-cutter" lessons where everyone has the same outcome. This book stresses a "divergent thinking processes" approach and creative problem solving, with an art therapy undertone. Most lesson suggestions may be done in different media to work within tight budgets. Anecdotal evidence from the author's guidance department indicates that students who take this course with this workbook are 50% less likely to fail standardized testing. These are real numbers that can grab the attention of your administration and Board of Education if you have the same results. These lessons combine information from core curriculum and merge it with fine art. Art is the meeting place for all subjects. When we grid-we use geometry. When we make sculptures-we use engineering. When we mix colors-we reveal information about physics. When we create illustrations for stories-we learn about literature. When we review the styles of art from da Vinci to Warhol-we teach history. Students not only come to understand the concepts, but use them, and manipulate them for deeper understanding on multiple sensory levels of thinking. This workbook is divided by multicurricula units so that this concrete connection to academic "core courses" is more easily seen. ALL projects are designed to have successful divergent results, incorporate creative problem solving, and bring relevant connections to students' lives. This book is built for student success on many levels from gifted to challenged. This in turn is helpful in fulfilling mandated accommodations so that no child is left behind. We recommend that you pair this book with the student edition of the same name. For those that teach in middle or high school, find our other title, "The Art Student's Workbook."

Creative Art: Methods and Materials educates readers about a variety of art methods and the ways different civilizations have used them in artistic expression. Each of the fourteen chapters is designed around a specific art method and material, and includes examples of art works and the artists who created them. Students learn about bronze casting, stone carving, clay sculpture, woodcuts and posters, glass work, and installation art. Each method is matched to artists both ancient and modern. Rather than adhering to a standard approach that focuses on white, male, European artists, the book broadens the student's perspective by including often overlooked female artists. Global in approach and comprehensive in coverage of arts forms, representations, and styles throughout history, Creative Art has been developed for sixteen-week courses in art appreciation, or introductory survey courses in art history.

History of art criticism - Describing and interpreting art - Judging art - Writing and talking about art - Theory and art criticism.

In Art and Representation, John Willats presents a radically new theory of pictures. To do this, he has developed a precise vocabulary for describing the representational systems in pictures: the ways in which artists, engineers, photographers, mapmakers, and children represent objects. His approach is derived from recent research in visual perception and artificial intelligence, and Willats begins by clarifying the key distinction between the marks in a picture and the features of the scene that these marks represent. The methods he uses are thus closer to those of a modern structural linguist or psycholinguist than to those of an art historian. Using over 150 illustrations, Willats analyzes the representational systems in pictures by artists from a wide variety of periods and cultures. He then relates these systems to the mental processes of picture production, and, displaying an impressive grasp of more than one scholarly discipline, shows how the Greek vase painters, Chinese painters, Giotto, icon painters, Picasso, Paul Klee, and David Hockney have put these systems to work. But this book is not only about what systems artists use but also about why artists from different periods and cultures have used such different systems, and why drawings by young children look so different from those by adults. Willats argues that the representational systems can serve many different functions beyond that of merely providing a convincing illusion. These include the use of anomalous pictorial devices such as inverted perspective, which may be used for expressive reasons or to distance the viewer from the depicted scene by drawing attention to the picture as a painted surface. Willats concludes that art historical changes, and the developmental changes in children's drawings, are not merely arbitrary, nor are they driven by evolutionary forces. Rather, they are determined by the different functions that the representational systems in pictures can serve. Like readers of Ernst Gombrich's famous Art and Illusion (still available from Princeton University Press), on which Art and Representation makes important theoretical advances, or Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception, Willats's readers will find that they will never again return to their old ways of looking at pictures.

Express yourself in a visual journal! With the ideas in this book, you will learn to create mixed media pages that express your soul and create a path to healing, internal freedom, and the sparking of passion. “Visual Journey Journaling” is an innovative artistic method taught by Rakefet Hadar and made up of seven elements: Intention, Magical Coincidence, Background, Images, Lines, Color, and Text. Visual Journey Journaling invites you to a fascinating world where you connect with your hidden inner artist to create "soul pages" using simple techniques and subtle guidelines to take a look inside yourself. Rakefet has taught these methods for many years, guiding even inexperienced artists to find and express the stories within themselves. In the first chapter of the book you will learn how to master the seven elements in your journal. There are many fun exercises and a step-by-step tutorial of how to start a simple journal. Next you will learn how to make a soul page with the seven elements. You will explore a variety of materials and how to work with them to find and create your pages. You will learn to build your journal and how to bind it into a finished book. Throughout the book and in the final section, you'll see and find the meanings in Rakefet's stunning private art journal pages and read her stories behind them.