A course in Graphic Arts Technology provides students with an understanding of the processes and systems common to careers in publishing, printing, and other forms of media distribution. Representative topics include graphic design concepts; art and copy preparation; image generation and editing; desktop publishing; on-demand publishing; school yearbook and magazine layout; advertising and promotion; printing technology; binding and finishing; and screen printing.Students will be committed to lifelong learning as they grow individually, participate in groups, think analytically, create artistic products, and contribute to production of a major project. Students will learn illustration design software such as Adobe Illustrator, photo editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, and page layout software such as Adobe InDesign to create projects that will be printed in traditional and digital formats.

Students will form two groups, and each group will analyze a still life. Then each student will write a three-paragraph essay describing how to draw the work of art they are studying. Each student will exchange his or her essay with someone in the other group who will draw the still life based on the essay's description. Depending on the accuracy of their peers' drawings, students will add more details to their essays.

Students will analyze "Man with a Hoe" by Jean-Francois Millet, and learn how the artist's use of shape and space creates emphasis. Students will discuss their interpretations of the painting and provide visual evidence to back up their ideas. They will create a persona poem that demonstrates their interpretation of how the man in the painting feels. Students will then illustrate their understanding of how shape and space creates emphasis by drawing a person in their family who works hard.

Students compare and contrast a photograph and a photo-collage depicting the same highway and write a descriptive composition of both images. They identify one-point perspective in works of art then draw a desert landscape using one-point perspective.

Students will learn about innovative light construction and three-dimensional properties while creating their own designs using limited paper materials. Students will be asked to work in teams to brainstorm and create a sculpture that implements light based on their chosen concept.  

Students will learn about the Pamunkey Indian Tribe in Virginia and the tribe’s history of clay vessels. Students will learn clay hand building methods and hand-build a clay vessel that tells a story.

Students will explore with watercolor techniques and collage to design their own character for a book cover.  Through an artist study on artist Eric Carle, students will observe and identify shapes in animals and use their painted papers for a collage.

In this lesson students will animate a ball bouncing into the "frame," squashing against the floor and stretching as it bounces up.  This lesson focuses on the first principle of animation called squash and stretch.  The lesson also explores exaggeration and timing.

Students will compare Ancient Greek architecture with the innovative and abstract contemporary architecture of renowned famous female Iraqi architect, Zaha Hadid. Students will respond to a design challenge and create a small-scale 3-D building model employing vision and originality to showcase their most creative idea of form and function.

Students will identify that creating a product, packaging, or place is the job of an artist using a creative design process to develop the very best solution. Students will use the iterative design process to develop ideas and create a new and innovative product, package, or place design.

Students will research Renaissance art and its historical characteristics. Students will combine anachronism and Renaissance technique, to recreate a painting. The student will demonstrate technical skill and independent thinking in the use of media, techniques, and processes to achieve desired intentions in the creation of their final product.

Looking at the history of drawing by analyzing the procedures used by famous artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, students will see the importance of gesture drawing skills. Through this lesson, gesture drawing skills are developed through observation of the movement of different subject matter: people and fish. Students will create their own personal work of art using observational, gesture drawings of fish and composition techniques.

Students will learn about the history of self-portraits throughout time and the use of various media and techniques to create them. Students will be creating their own cardboard relief self-portrait while learning about facial proportion and illustrating from observation.

Students will learn about cartoonists Charles Schulz and Jackie Ormes, and the correlation between their comics and current events of their time. Inspired by their work, students will create their own comic strips to share their perspectives on a current event they feel a personal connection with or that they have interest in.

Students will learn about the history of portraits throughout time and the use of various media and techniques such as fiber arts to create them. Students will be creating their own yarn portraits while learning about the history of fiber arts, portraits throughout time, and illustrating from observation.  

This is an introduction to foundational drawing and observational skills, through a series of practice drawings that culminate into a creative still life project. The still life projects focus on foundational observational drawing skills, basic composition, and allow opportunities for student collaboration.

Students will learn about new media and “Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii” by Nam June Paik. Students will create an animation depicting an aspect of an assigned region of Virginia, then add it to a collaborative class map. 

While being introduced to a variety of poets, students will be able to find personal connections with the works. These personal connections will be developed into narrative illustrations of their own life.

This unit of study allows for students to gain understanding and confidence in figure drawing over a series of 3 separate lessons that result in a collaborative mural. These lessons can be used to facilitate an assessment of student growth and skills development, while still encouraging expression through different types of art explorations and working both individually and collaboratively.

Students will learn about artists who create assemblages using found objects. After learning about colors and spatial relationships in composition, students will create an assemblage using found household objects in the color of their choice.