Art Design Courses - What to Look For

By Bryon Zirker

Two of your major art design course objectives should first be an emphasis on your professional skills development and to gain the techniques, skills, methodology, and vocabulary that will be required for your success as a productive artist, designer, or scholar.

You second objective should be the development of critical judgment and historical perspective that you will need to become a problem solver. With art and design history mixed in with studies in the liberal arts and sciences, gives you the context for stimulating intellectual and creative thinking.

Art design is not simply about what you see, it is about what you can make someone else see. Find courses that start with the exploration of art design fundamentals, ones that provide the experience suitable for beginning as well as advanced artists. Once you gain a basic understanding of how to see and describe something in visual terms, you can investigate expressive and experimental directions in your art designs.

Working with the dynamics of color has significant implications in the work of artists, illustrators, craftspeople and designers. The course you choose should explore the issue of color by developing creative exercises, look at studies from nature, the human environment using collage, paint and other art media. Look for or request projects that will facilitate in-depth exploration of the role of light, the psychological impact of color on the brain, and how such factors as hue, value and intensity affect artistic design. Historical background should be provided via lectures and power point presentations.

As an artist you should be constantly researching new materials and inventing new creative processes to for a new piece. Find a multi-disciplinary course which will allow you to experiment with a lot of different media types in reaction to a specific site or location, for example, sound-based, sculptural, a drawing or a painting.

As for great artistic figurative sculpturing it must not be left untouched and let me say it does not just simply copy nature, indeed no, it takes the essential qualities that it needs from nature turning them into the beautiful visual language of three dimensional form. The artist's visual language is how the sculptor conceives of the figure and interprets anatomy. You must learn to think of the human body as an interconnected system full of layered forms. You will want to learn how to about combining close perceptual study of a posing model with a conceptual understanding of the human body's shapes and proportions, finally learning how to create your visualizations of the human figure. You really should include in your art design course studies critical thinking about what it means to represent the human body in your art.