DEFINITION

VISUAL ARTS
The visual arts are those creations that
we can see rather than something like the
auditory arts, which we hear. These art
forms are extremely diverse, from the
artwork that hangs on your wall to the
movie you watched last night.

The visual arts are art forms such

as textile, ceramics, drawing, painting,
printmaking, crafts, photography,
video/filmmaking and architecture. Most
artistic disciplines (performing arts and
media arts) involve aspects of the visual
arts as well as arts of other types.
Fashion, graphic and interior design also Temptation of the Mind and Body
fall under this category.

What Types of Art Are Visual Arts?

The visual arts include mediums such as
drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture,
photography, film, and printmaking. Many of
these pieces of art are created to stimulate us
through a visual experience. When we look at
them, they often provoke a feeling of some sort.
Within the visual arts is a category known as
the decorative arts, or craft. This is art that is
more utilitarian and has a function but retains an
artistic style and still requires talent to create.
The decorative arts include ceramics, furniture
making, textiles, interior design, jewelry making,
metal crafting, and woodworking.

PLACEHOLDER
PAINTING Questions to ponder
What is painting for you?
Painting is an important form in the visual arts, Give at least 5 significance or contributions of
bringing in elements such as drawing, composition, painting to our society and explain why?
gesture (as in gestural painting), narration (as in What do you think is the problem today
narrative art), and abstraction (as in abstract art). which we can associate with painting

Elements of Painting From prehistoric times to the present day, the

Shapes Texture painting process has remained basically the same.

Lines Tones As in drawing, artists use pigments, or powdered

colors, suspended in a medium or binder that holds
Colors the particles of pigment together.

Dirt, rock, plants, etc. are the raw

material, which is ground down into
what is called a pigment.

Natural or synthetic colored

materials finely ground into a
powder.

Forms of Painting
Murals Miniature Distance
Mural painting has its roots in the primeval A strong moment is more than highlighting a The distance the photographer chooses to be
instincts of people to decorate their particular subject or from their subject will
surroundings and to use wall surfaces as a action in time affect the feeling and overall impact a photo has.
form for expressing ideas, emotions, and
beliefs.

Easel
The easel, or studio, picture was a form
developed during the Renaissance with the
establishment of the painter as an individual
artist. Its scale and portability enabled
European artists to extend the range of
themes, previously restricted to those suitable
to mural decoration.
Composition
is about putting together objects in your frame
in such a way as to emphasize the parts you
want to and make them stand out in a
particular way.
SCULPTURE
An artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are
worked into three-dimensional art objects. The
designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in
reliefs on surfaces, or in environments ranging from
tableaux to contexts that envelop the spectator. An
enormous variety of media may be used,
including clay, wax, stone, metal,
fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random
“found” objects. Materials may be carved, modeled,
molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or
otherwise shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed term that applies to a
permanently circumscribed category of objects or sets
of activities. It is, rather, the name of an art that grows
and changes and is continually extending the range of
its activities and evolving new kinds of objects. The
scope of the term was much wider in the second half of
the 20th century than it had been only two or three
decades before, and in the fluid state of the visual
arts at the turn of the 21st century nobody can predict
what its future extensions are likely to be.

Sculptural Processes
Subtractive Unwanted materials is cut away

Additive Construction of a figure by putting together

Substractive Sculpture Additive Sculpture

Principles of Sculptural Design

Orientation
To create a sense of harmony (or
disharmony) in the sculpture itself, or
between parts of it, or between the sculpture
and the viewer, or between the sculpture and
its surroundings
Scale
This refers, for example, to the need to
create a sculpture in tune with the scale of its
surroundings.
Balance
Balance involves two principal matters.. The
sculptural body must be physically stable and
the statue must project a sense of dynamic
or static equilibrium.

Proportion
How sculptors handle proportionality varies
considerably. Some observed hierarchic non-
naturalistic canons of proportion Other
sculptors have followed more naturalistic but
equally iconometric rules of proportion.
Articulation
This describes how sculptural figures (and
other forms) are jointed:, either how the
differing parts of a body merge in a single
form, or how separate sections come
together.

Elements of Sculptural Design

The two principal elements of sculpture
are mass and space. Mass refers to the sculpture's
bulk, the solid bit contained within its surfaces. Space
is the air around the solid sculpture, and reacts with
the latter in several ways.
Another important element of (most) sculptures are
their surfaces. These can produce quite different
visual effects according to whether they are (eg)
convex or concave, flat or modelled, coloured or
uncoloured.