Student work
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Arts Education - Visual Arts
About the Unit / Course
The work was completed in Unit ECA434 / ECA734 (this is a combined Unit) 'Arts Education Discipline Studies 4 -Visual Arts'
The students come from:
two postgraduate courses:
- Master of Teaching 1st year
- Bachelor of Teaching (Primary & Secondary) 2nd and final year
and two undergraduate courses -
- Bachelor of Arts / Bachelor of Teaching (Secondary) 4th and final year
- Bachelor of Education (Primary) 3rd year
Students who are going to be a Visual Arts teacher in a Secondary school or a Prep to Year 12 Visual Arts teacher take this unit, along with Primary education students who are taking a Visual arts major. This cross-section of students creates a really stimulating studio atmosphere and results in a constant exchange of perspectives and a particularly high level of excellence.
This is a Trimester 2 unit and students have a lot of teaching round commitments. They get only 7 or 9 weeks of class time and spend a great deal more time completing the work in addition to the 4 hours of class time per week. Students are prepared to put in the hours because they realize that what they take from their units in Visual Arts education is what they will primarily draw upon to teach when they begin their first teaching position.
What the Assignment required:
Students had to present a folio of completed artworks in response to 11 Visual Arts tasks if they are Secondary education students and 9 if they are Primary education students. Some tasks required more than one artwork.
They all had to hand in an extensive Visual Diary containing all sources of ideas, exploration of media, techniques and processes, application of art elements, principles and concepts, an explanation of any technical problems encountered and how these were solved as well as any annotations that the student believed will assist them in their future teaching practice.
The eleven tasks included:
- how to paint lean to fat using oil paint on canvas - focussing on realism and photorealism
- how to teach impasto techniques in oils on canvas - focussing on impressionist, alla prima, post-impressionist styles
- painting in acrylics on a ground of cut cardboard words on MDF board using a limited colour palette
- experimental painting in acrylics by building up layers on MDF board and discovering the final composition when the masked parts of each of the layers are removed
- painting using gouache or watercolour on paper taking a design and/or illustration approach
- using an acrylic, watercolour or ink wash on paper and/or fabric with hand stitched or machine stitched line drawing
- drawing in oil pastels and grey-lead pencil on card focussing on colour, form and movement in open and closed compositions
- Body art - painting on the human body as a canvas
- Computer aided art using PhotoShop and own Body art images
- sculpture made of recycled materials, for example,
- re-conceptualised toys
- totemic sculpture made from carpet or
linoleum roll inner tubes
- paper mache bowls
- soft sculpture - appropriation to comment on concepts related to an area or issue of individual interest derived from research into
Visual Culture in our Postmodern context
The collection of artworks you can view on this site are by the class of 2010. This class was a notably hard working and highly motivated group of individuals eager to explore art techniques and ideas. They represent the very best of what Deakin Visual Arts education graduates have to offer our Primary and Secondary schools.
