A Level Art & Design: Fine Art
Do you enjoy drawing? Would you like to improve your skills and knowledge? Would you like the opportunity to see and understand the world in a different way? This course offers you the opportunity to develop creatively, either as a personally enriching interest or as part of a progression towards a career within the creative industries.
Key information
Art & Design / Full Time / A Levels and Equivalent
Why choose this course?
The course starts with a range of varied and challenging workshops which develop key skills and knowledge fundamental to the world of Art and Design. The course gradually builds around each student, to meet your creative interests and needs.
What will I learn?
You will begin the course with varied approaches to observation and drawing through which your visual understanding will improve. During a series of workshops you will explore a range of two-dimensional materials and approaches, such as tone, mark making, ink, mixed media, colour and painting. The workshops are structured to encourage personal confidence in your own preferences and interests. You will explore how a range of modern and historic artists have communicated ideas through their imagery and techniques.
Your sketchbook documents your evolving skills and knowledge along with new artistic terms and ideas, which you will record through your own style of note taking. By the end of the first year you will have developed a body of work which explores personal ideas through to a final outcome.
The second year builds on your learning. There is one personally negotiated, focused coursework project and one exam project. Experimental drawing practical workshops are held throughout the year, encouraging you to take risks and work in new and different ways.
As well as being creative, there is a small written element. The second year is supported by group presentations, strengthening your analytical skills through both discussion and written work, preparing you well for Higher Education. Towards the end of the course you are given eight weeks lecture time to prepare for a 15 hour exam. The preparation time forms a personal project responding to a chosen exam theme; the 15 hour exam time is used to create a final piece which resolves this final project.
Component 1: Personal Investigation
Internally Assessed
60% of A Level
The Personal Investigation consists of a major in-depth, practical, critical and theoretical investigative project/theme-based portfolio. Learners will be required to carry out an extended critical and contextual analysis (1000 word minimum requirement).
Component 2: Externally Set Assignment
Internally Assessed
40% of A Level
Learners will be required to independently develop a personal response to one of a varied range of stimuli. Learners will develop their response during a preparatory study period culminating in a 15 hour sustained focus study.
Assessment Arrangements
The Art Department is friendly, supportive, ambitious and hardworking. Achievement in this subject relies heavily on your attendance, punctuality and commitment to learning, both independently and within lectures.
You will be encouraged to try a broad range of approaches, which you will then refine into ways of working which suit your individual interests, acquiring and developing specialist skills in your chosen discipline.
Independent work is fundamental to the course at least 50% of all work assessed should have happened outside the classroom.
Homework is set weekly. Initially, it is set by lecturers and will be tightly specified and closely linked to class workshops; it will be monitored regularly. As the course develops you will be required to set your own homework/independent work based on agreed learning needs.
Your ongoing work will be assessed in lessons through focused 1:1 discussion. Sketchbook work will be assessed regularly for reflective, thoughtful, analytical critical evaluation and annotation. Emphasis is upon the development towards a final piece, through observation and technical, aesthetic and conceptual refinement.
You will also be assessed against how your research of art, craft, design, media and technologies in contemporary and past societies and cultures improves your own understanding and practice.
Discussions and presentations are a vital part of our assessment process and you will be expected to contribute to these during your lessons.
Information & Support
Independent practice will be supported through PowerPoints, worksheets and other guides available through our Sharepoint course. We also provide further support through focused boards on Pinterest. College trips to visit museums and galleries will be offered and we encourage our students to visit galleries both locally and nationally to support their work.
What will I need?
Five GCSEs at grade 4 or above (including Art) and a 5 in English (Lang. or Lit). You will also require a keen interest in drawing to develop your creativity, as a design stimulus and as a means of gathering creative ideas and making them visible is absolutely essential.
Where will it take me?
A qualification in Fine Art is highly valued by many universities and employers alike. As a ‘classical’ ‘creative’ subject it is applicable to almost any progression in Art and Design. It is also an excellent subject to complement many courses, such as Architecture, Interior Architecture, History of Art, Film, Prosthetics and Theatrical Makeup, Art Therapy and Education.
Additional Information
Awarding Body:
Eduqas
Further Information
To obtain more information about this course, please call: 01208 224000 or email enquiry@callywith.ac.uk