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creativity Blog Posts- Page 2 of 26 - The Open College of the Arts

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Student stories: Ange Mullins thumb

Student stories: Ange Mullins

I’m Ange, a Creative Arts student, and I’m within touching distance of the finishing  line after many years of study with OCA. I began in about 2008, although I can’t  now recall exactly when I signed up with what was then a very different OCA. I  joined purely as a means to learn more about ‘art’, a promise validated with a  certificate of completion at the end, along with a vague suggestion to have work  assessed; little did I realise that my journey would culminate with a BA (Hons) Creative Arts Degree. 

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Student work: Creative Arts thumb

Student work: Creative Arts

As a tutor I find the exciting challenge is how students can then be encouraged to combine, apply, and adapt these skills as they start to build and test their own interdisciplinary approach inside the unit supported by the course materials.  Rachael Barns has recently completed 1.2 and her work is an excellent example of how skills can be combined and adapted to produce Creative work

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Department stories: Garden Design thumb

Department stories: Garden Design

One of the earlier projects in the first unit involved completing exercises in observational drawing. I recently asked students who had completed Unit 1.1 to send me some of their more recent sketches to see how they have developed their sketching skills. 

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Student work: Archive as Creative Presentation  thumb

Student work: Archive as Creative Presentation 

This blog post introduces the production of a creative archive by ECA student Tim Harbridge. Tim’s Box Concert archive demonstrates an excellent and engaging use of combined methods across film, audio, physical objects, and installation. 

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Student stories: Explorations in Drawing, Painting, Mixed Media, and Technology thumb

Student stories: Explorations in Drawing, Painting, Mixed Media, and Technology

I am delighted to launch this exhibition; Explorations in Drawing, Painting, Mixed Media, and Technology; at The Best Little Virtual Gallery hosted by Artsteps. As a peer critique group, we have been meeting monthly on Zoom to present and discuss our work and support each other through what is a very long period of study with many ups and downs.

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What’s in a sketch?  thumb

What’s in a sketch? 

Firstly, sketching offers us a quick means to document our observations of different spaces and designs. No, these don’t have to be hyper realistic perspective sketches that show every detail. Instead, these are sketches that can be done quickly to explore various aspects of a design that might be helpful for us to understand more deeply to apply to our own designs. 

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