Drawing Still Life and Nature

Choose and handle drawing media, use the formal elements to set up and plan a still life, show form with light and value, shade with six techniques, represent texture, and draw still life and natural objects from careful observation.

2

Exploring Value with Primary Colours

Mix clean tints and shades of the three primary colours, use practical mixing techniques and home-made paints, model solid form in a single colour with a planned value ladder, and follow the principles of good painting practice from preparing a surface to cleaning up.

3

Motif Design and Stamp Printing

Recognise and classify types of motifs, design original motifs from observation, carve relief stamps safely from low-cost materials, plan and align two-colour prints, and print neat designs on paper, cloth and other real objects.

4

Lettering

Recognise and draw serif and sans-serif letterforms, describe the parts and characteristics of letters, space and size lettering with guidelines, build a clear visual hierarchy, balance and compose lettering layouts, and combine letter styles with purpose.

5

Modelling Still Life and Natural Forms

Understand how clay behaves and why it shrinks, plan a still life or natural form and build an armature for it, join clay onto the armature with score and slip, then refine the surface with texture and dry and finish the model, using local clay and low-cost tools.

6

Collage with a Message

Read a collage the way you read a poster: what you see, how it was made and what it means. Plan a message for a real audience with thumbnail sketches and a composition grid, meet the main kinds of message collage, prepare your own papers with simple paint techniques, and assemble, finish and present a mixed-media collage neatly and safely, using old magazines, newspapers, kitenge offcuts, banana leaves and home-made paste.

7

The Art of Embroidery

Meet embroidery as a world art, from Kuba raffia cloth to Bengali kantha and Chinese silk badges. Choose and prepare the tools and materials safely, learn six fundamental stitches (running, back, stem, chain, satin and French knot) from numbered step diagrams, and carry out your own sampler project from design to a finished, pressed piece.

8

Introduction to World Art

Travel from the first marks people made on stone to the masterpieces of the 1800s: prehistoric paintings from France, Argentina and southern Africa; the rules of Ancient Egyptian and Greek art; the perspective and oil paint of the Renaissance; Benin brass, Chokwe masks and Islamic geometry; Chinese ink landscapes, Japanese woodblock prints and Inca textiles. Learn to read any artwork in three steps, place it on a timeline and a map, and compare styles across periods and continents.

Units