China 高三 Fine Art
Chapters: 3
1. Selective 5: Crafts
Ceramics, tie/wax dye, paper, weaving, embroidery, shadow puppets, joinery, paper-cut, lanterns, kites, fans; intangible heritage
- Traditional Crafts – A traditional craft is a way of making useful and beautiful things by hand, using local materials and skills passed from one generation to the next. Pottery shapes and fires clay, weaving interlaces warp and weft threads, paper-cutting uses folds to make symmetric patterns, and woodwork joins wood with cut joints. The craft spirit means patience, precision, respect for materials and pride in careful work.
2. Selective 6: Modern media art
Photography; video; digital painting and animation; interactive art
- Digital Media: How Pictures, Sound and Video Become Numbers – Digital media is any picture, sound, video or animation stored as numbers on a computer. A raster image is a grid of pixels, each stored as red, green and blue values from 0 to 255. Vector graphics store shapes as maths, so they stay sharp at any size. Video and animation are many frames shown quickly. File size grows with resolution and colour depth, so we use compression. When we make or share media we must respect copyright, licences and people's image rights, and work safely and critically.
3. Electives (for art-college applicants)
Art history and theory · Sketching · Drawing · Colour · Creation and design
- Art History: From Cave Walls to Today – People have made art for at least 40,000 years. Prehistoric art shows animals and hands on cave walls. Ancient civilisations made art for rulers, gods and the afterlife. Classical traditions arose in Greece and Rome, India, China, Africa and the Americas. The Renaissance brought perspective and realism; modern art (from about 1860) broke those rules; contemporary art uses any material. To appreciate any artwork, describe it, analyse its elements, interpret its meaning in its context, and judge why it works.
- Sketching: From Simple Shapes to Quick Figures – A sketch is a quick, loose drawing that catches the main shapes, proportions and light of what you see. Good sketching follows a path: look and measure, see simple shapes, block in with light construction lines, add tone from one light source, then refine. Quick figure sketches start with a line of action and use the head as a unit (an adult is about 7½ heads tall).
- Drawing and Painting – Drawing is a way of seeing and thinking: we use it to record what we observe, to remember, to plan designs and to express ideas. A good drawing starts by blocking in: seeing objects as simple shapes (sphere, box, cylinder) and checking proportions with light lines. Line then defines edges, and line weight (heavy or light) shows what is near or far. Light gives form: on a lit object we see the highlight, mid-tone, core shadow, reflected light and cast shadow. Tonal value runs from white to black; strong contrast of light and dark is called chiaroscuro, and a picture can be in a high key (mostly light) or low key (mostly dark). Dry media (graphite, charcoal, pastels, coloured pencils) build tone with hatching, cross-hatching, stippling and blending; wet media (ink, watercolour, gouache, acrylic, oil) build it with washes, layers (glazes) and mixing colours. Linear and atmospheric perspective show space, and figure drawing uses proportion, gesture and foreshortening. Artists record ideas in sketchbooks and use traditional, alternative and digital tools safely and sustainably.
- Colour Theory: The Colour Wheel, Harmonies, Mixing and Meaning – Colour theory is a set of simple rules for mixing and combining colours. In paint, red, yellow and blue are the primary colours; two primaries make a secondary (orange, green, violet); a primary plus its neighbouring secondary makes a tertiary, giving a 12-part colour wheel. Every colour has three dimensions: hue (its name), value (light or dark: tints, shades, tones) and saturation (bright or dull). Harmonies such as complementary, analogous, triadic and monochrome help colours work together. Warm colours seem to come forward and cool ones go back. Light mixes by adding (RGB makes white); paint and ink mix by taking light away (CMY makes near-black). Colour also carries feeling and cultural meaning.
- The Design Process: From Problem to Product – The design process is a loop of steps designers use to solve a real problem for real people: investigate the need, define it in a brief and a measurable specification, generate many ideas, build a prototype, then test and evaluate it against the specification. Whatever fails sends you back round the loop. This repeating is called iteration, and it is how almost every product, app, building and artwork is improved.