The analysis of Visual Arts is a really worthwhile endeavor due to its practical lessons which help in accruing practical knowledge when you look at the development of artistic products. However, some teachers regarding the subject have made the undertaking of this practical lessons a headache for both parents and students. They do this by asking students to acquire modern, refined and expensive tools and materials for practical demonstration and exercises. This imposes huge financial burden on low income generating parents as well as students who fend on their own through petty trading.
There is and so the need to sensitize visual art teachers from the essence of recommending and using less costly but viable tools and materials for artistic productions. There are many found materials into the environments which when well utilized, can produce breath-taking, awe-inspiring works of art. These include shell, seeds of some fruits, stones, earth pigments, shrubs of some trees as well as their leaves, bones of animals, and other media readily found in the environment. These materials are provided by nature and thus try not to attract any monetary value and therefore can be utilized by students that are pressed economically. Indirectly, improvising and making use of these materials for artistic creation would develop and heighten the creative abilities of those students.
For example, Graphic designer tutors teaching simple tips to write beautiful penmanship in the shape of calligraphy for inscriptions on supports like paper and bits of clothes to be used as wall hangings and so on can ask their students to fashion their calligraphy pens from bamboo sticks, raffia palm or canes rather than purchasing the already made metallic nib calligraphy pens at exorbitant prices. Expensive vehicles or inks such as for example Pelikan inks, Indian inks and Rotring Inks that demand huge sums may be substituted with more affordable equally viable inks like the injection violet known in the local parlance in Ghana as 'JV' paint.
Also, textile teachers teaching learners how exactly to engage in printmaking can use cheap, easily available materials for the development of screens or image carriers to carry out of the print. As an example, instead on stubbornly insisting that learners produce photographic screen which will be expensive, s/he can suggest the employment of lacquered screen, candle-wax screen or paper stencil screens which can be less expensive and demand less energy in undertaking such lessons.
Moreover, foodstuffs like yams, cassava along with Styrofoam along with other forms of foam that are less expensive and may be obtained from the environment can be utilized for producing relief blocks for block printing instead of Lino, carved wood and the like that are expensive.
In addition, teachers of visual art also needs to lessen the amounts of products students are to produce for starters practical topic rather than needlessly demanding the production of a large number of products in one practical topic. The exposure and participation within the practical lesson is what should really be of paramount importance to art teachers.
These pragmatic measures and suggestions when implemented by art teachers may help in arresting the process of high purchases of media for artistic production by learners. It will also stop the wrong labeling associated with visual art programme by some as an extremely financially soaking course of study barring poor income generating parents to enroll their wards. It will probably help with raising the image of visual art education to a higher pedestal, training huge number of minds with practical knowledge for societal development and upliftment.
Less soaking and less effective practical lessons in visual arts often helps allay the fears of low income generating parents who does want their wards to enroll in visual art education. It will likewise broaden the creative horizon of learners and increase their abilities of improvisation and sustainable development for societal growth and nation building.
