Program Overview:

The Visual Arts Literacy year seeks to empower young artists by giving them a strong foundation in traditional representational skills. This first year of the three-year diploma program is designed to build a skill foundation that makes success in the remaining two years possible.  The curriculum includes extensive life drawing, perspective and structural drawing, design and composition, colour theory and painting in both oil and gouache, as well as still life drawing with an emphasis on rendering and 3D form.

To create art we need to develop a variety of abilities.  We need to learn to 'see', ie. to increase our visual awareness and sensitivity, our ability to note and express relationships of all kinds.  We need to learn to see the real world as if it were a painting or drawing, to translate from the three-dimensional world onto a flat surface an arrangement of shapes, lines, values and colours that will communicate our experience.  We need to learn to use our imaginations to experience what we are drawing or painting by using all of our senses, for by participating we know what to stress, what to give more weight, where to lead the eye.

In studying the drawing of human beings, we approach a subject that requires not only technical knowledge, such as anatomy and perspective, but tactile sensory experience, an ability to feel and express both physical movement and emotion through the use of visual language.

The combination of courses our students take in our Year One Visual Arts Literacy program has been structured to optimize the development of these skills and sensitivities.  The knowledge they acquire can be applied to a variety of visual-art disciplines, from graphic design to animation to multimedia studies.