IB Visual Arts

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

IB Visual Arts is a course that allows students to express their inner most creativity in a variety of ways.  The free reign in which students are given allows them to explore certain  areas of art that they have yet to experience.  The course encourages an artist to push past his or her boundaries, reaching to new levels of artistry.  

The International Baccalaureate Diploma Program offers IB Visual Arts as an elective that can be taken at either standard level or higher level.  The curriculum is the same for both levels, however higher level students are given in the opportunity to go more in-depth with their pieces.

Would I recommend IB Visual Arts?

I take the IB Visual Arts course at Princess Anne High School in Virginia Beach, VA, and I would highly recommend it.  It’s similar to your average art course, but you are given in enormous amount of freedom.  You can choose from various types of media, such as charcoal on cardboard, metallic sculptures, spray paint, and whatever else your mind can think of.

The course encourages you to relate your works to various cultures which can be very interesting.  It ensures that you do some form of research before actually creating your piece.  The class content sort of depends on what level of IB Visual Arts you are taking, but research is very important in both, and I feel majority of your time should go into research and planning.

What should you research?

You want to discover various artists, compositions, artistic styles, and culture references that can be implemented into your piece.  For example, I plan on doing a charcoal on cardboard drawing piece, and I am referencing an artist named Henry Yan.  This artists does a lot of pencil drawings and charcoal pieces, in turn allowing me to make a connection between his pieces and my own.

Where should you interpret your research?

The connections between your piece and your research will be displayed in an investigation workbook.  This is where all of your research will be written, and it should include small sketches, a display of several composition techniques, along with various other things.  The most important thing to display in your investigation notebook is the process.  This is very valuable to the examiners that will be grading your notebook for this IB Visual Arts course.  You want to ensure that the examiner can determine how your piece went from an idea, to its physical form.

I believe that certain procedures vary depending on which IB program you are in, but here at Princess Anne, the examiners only have our investigation notebooks.  They won’t actually be seeing our pieces, only pictures of our pieces, so it is very important to be detailed and specific with process.  I like to work from the outside in when I get an idea.  My ideas tend to be very specific, so I know what I want the piece to look like.

Considering this, I typically describe, in my investigation notebook, the research that I’ve been doing to make sure that my piece is of the highest quality.  For example I did a piece, and the background was inspired by “the Scream” by Edward Munch.  In this case, I put a bit of biographical information about Edward Munch, and I had a page dedicated to Expressionist art because “the Scream” is an example of Expressionism.  These are just a few examples of what I did for my investigation notebook.

Is IB Visual Arts right for you?

IB Visual Arts is the perfect course if you are serious about taking your art to another level, and exploring exactly how far your capabilities reach.  Here you can take a look at the IB Visual Art curriculum, and see if IB Visual Arts is what you are looking for.