Welcome to Our Art Appreciation: South African Art For Kids Homeschool Course

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

Eighteen African art for kids lessons introduce homeschool students to notable South African artists of the 19th-21st centuries, along with elements of art and aspects of composition.

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, have 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 3-dimensional. Perspective is used to imitate this real space on a 2-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 3-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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