ARTS AND CRAFTS
Art, a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or
imagination. The term art encompasses diverse media such
as painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, decorative arts, photography, and
installation.
The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling,
and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of
thinking, doing, and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both highly dynamic
and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into
innovative, stylized, and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through
sustained and deliberate study, training, and/or theorizing within a particular tradition,
across generations, and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through
which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural, and individual identities while
transmitting values, impressions, judgements, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings,
patterns of life, and experiences across time and space.
Prominent examples of the arts include:
visual
arts (including architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photogra
phy, and sculpting)
literary arts (including fiction, drama, poetry, and prose)
performing arts (including dance, music, and theatre)
They can employ skill and imagination to produce objects and performances, convey
insights and experiences, and construct new environments and spaces.
The arts can refer to common, popular, or everyday practices as well as more
sophisticated, systematic, or institutionalized ones. They can be discrete and self-
contained or combine and interweave with other art forms, such as the combination of
artwork with the written word in comics. They can also develop or contribute to some
particular aspect of a more complex art form, as in cinematography. By definition, the
arts themselves are open to being continually redefined. The practice of modern art, for
example, is a testament to the shifting boundaries, improvisation and experimentation,
reflexive nature, and self-criticism or questioning that art and its conditions of
production, reception, and possibility can undergo.
CRAFT
A craft or trade is a pastime or an occupation that requires particular skills and
knowledge of skilled work. In a historical sense, particularly the Middle Ages and earlier,
the term is usually applied to people occupied in small scale production of goods, or
their maintenance, for example by tinkers. The traditional term craftsman is nowadays
often replaced by artisan and by craftsperson.
Handicraft is the "traditional" main sector of the crafts. It is a type of work where useful
and decorative devices are made completely by hand or by using only simple tools. The
term is usually applied to traditional means of making goods. The
individual artisanship of the items is a paramount criterion, an such items often have
cultural and/or religious significance. Items made by mass production or machines are
not handicraft goods.
The term crafts is used to describe artistic practices within the family of decorative
arts that traditionally are defined by their relationship to functional or utilitarian products
(such as sculptural forms in the vessel tradition) or by their use of such natural media
as wood, clay, ceramics, glass, textiles, and metal.
SCRAPBOOK
Scrapbooking is a method of preserving, presenting, and arranging personal and
family history in the form of a book, box, or card. Typical memorabilia include
photographs, printed media, and artwork. Scrapbook albums are often decorated and
frequently contain extensive journal entries or written descriptions. Scrapbooking started
in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century.
The most important scrapbooking supply is the album itself, which can be permanently
bound, or allow for the insertion of pages. There are other formats such as mini albums
and accordion-style fold-out albums. Some of these are adhered to various containers,
such as matchbooks, CD cases, or other small holders. When scrap artists started
moving away from the "page" and onto alternative surfaces and objectives, they termed
these creations "altered items" or now simply called "off-the-page". This movement
circles back to the history of art from the 1960s when Louise Nevelson was doing
"Assemblages" with found objects and recycled parts.
Basic materials include background papers (including printed and cardstock paper),
photo corner mounts (or other means of mounting photos such as adhesive dots, photo
mounting tape, or acid-free glue), scissors, a paper trimmer or cutting tool, art pens,
archival pens for journaling, and mounting glues (like thermo-tac). More elaborate
designs require more specialized tools such as die cut templates, rubber stamps, craft
punches, stencils, inking tools, eyelet setters, heat embossing tools, and personal die
cut machines. Many people who enjoy scrapbooking will create their own background
papers by using the tools mentioned along with "fancy" textured scissors.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light,
either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-
sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science,
manufacturing (e.g., photolithography), and business, as well as its more direct uses for
art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication.
Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries, relating to seeing
an image and capturing the image. The discovery of the camera obscura ("dark
chamber" in Latin) that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China.
Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid independently described a camera obscura
in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the 6th century CE, Byzantine
mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments.
Originally, all photography was monochrome, or black-and-white. Even after color film
was readily available, black-and-white photography continued to dominate for decades,
due to its lower cost, chemical stability, and its "classic" photographic look. The tones
and contrast between light and dark areas define black-and-white
photography. Monochromatic pictures are not necessarily composed of pure blacks,
whites, and intermediate shades of gray but can involve shades of one
particular hue depending on the process. The cyanotype process, for example,
produces an image composed of blue tones. The albumen print process, publicly
revealed in 1847, produces brownish tones.
Color photography was explored beginning in the 1840s. Early experiments in color
required extremely long exposures (hours or days for camera images) and could not
"fix" the photograph to prevent the color from quickly fading when exposed to white
light.
A large variety of photographic techniques and media are used in the process of
capturing images for photography. These include the camera; dual photography; full-
spectrum, ultraviolet and infrared media; light field photography; and other imaging
techniques.
TEXTILES, WOOD, METAL, CLAY, PAPER OR CANVAS AND PLANTS
INTERIOR DESIGN (IMPORTANCE, PURPOSE AND BASIC
PRINCIPLES)
ELEMENTS OF INTERIOR DESIGN
