Welcome to Our Art Appreciation: South African Art for Kids Homeschool Curriculum

Course Sample for Our Art Appreciation: South African Art For Kids Homeschool Course

How do we LOOK AT AFRICAN ART FOR KIDS?

We start by asking simple questions like: who is the artist, when and where did he or she live and create the artwork, what is the subject matter, and what is the medium? Having that as basics, we can move on to analyze the work itself according to the art appreciation vocabulary.

GETTING TO KNOW THE ELEMENTS OF AFRICAN ART

What then is the LANGUAGE, or ELEMENTS, of ART? We look at line, shape and mass, light and shade, space, texture, and color. Each of these, in turn, has their own vocabulary:

LINE defines the edge of a shape. It is the path left by a moving point. Line in itself is not found in nature, but it is essential for depicting objects or defining shapes.

SHAPE and MASS is the area enclosed by a line. Shape also refers to circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles. The mass, or volume, of a shape can be defined by light falling on the shape.

LIGHT and SHADE refers to tonal values. It is the lightness or darkness of an object or area.

SPACE in real life is three-dimensional. Perspective is used to imitate this real space on a two-dimensional surface. There is also positive space, which is the object and negative space, which is the space around the object. Sculpture on the other hand, is three-dimensional because it has height, width, and depth, giving us the chance to walk around it.

TEXTURE is the quality of an object through touch (actual, real, tactile texture) or the quality of an object through implementing the elements (implied or visual texture).

COLOR is powerful, complex, and appealing. It has three characteristics: HUE is the name of the color (red, blue etc); VALUE refers to how light or dark a color is; INTENSITY describes how bright or dull a color is. Warm colors include yellows and reds. Cool colors include blues and greens. Although color is impressive, many art forms lacks the use of it but are still regarded as powerful works of art: for example, black-and-white films, etchings, drawings, and sculpture.

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