The art department teachers Alex Bastian, Erin Bastian, and Wade Walton decided to shake things up for next school year, by deleting, changing, and adding art elective options.

The art department used to have 14 classes: art history, general art, Drawing I, II, and III, Studio Art I, II, III, and IV, illustration, ink and watercolor media, commercial art, and Painting I and II.

However, next school year will boast a different roster of art classes.

The first major change is the addition of two new classes: creative advertising and global arts.

“Creative advertising is likely to appear different from typical art classes. Students in creative advertising will have opportunities to explore mediums like digital illustration software, screen printing, and television and social media as advertising tools, in addition to traditional art mediums.

Students will have to determine the best tools to create the advertisements for their chosen client as well as meet with their client and seek approval for their advertisement proposals,” said Alex Bastian.

Global arts will be more like a typical art class and explore the art of cultures around the world.

“I am looking forward to being able to expose my students to new, unique mediums in this course that they would not be exposed to in any other of our art courses,” said Erin Bastian.

Creative advertising will run for juniors and senior, and global arts is available to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and neither require prerequisites.

While, the art department will offer creative advertising every year, they will only offer global arts every other year. Years when global arts is not in rotation, art history will run.

Each teacher brings something special to their new classes.

“I would like students to know that Creative Advertising is a course that will allow them to actively promote things in our school that they like or are involved in.

It is also a course that will generally focus more on the end product than the process. They will learn ways to make art more efficiently through new techniques and shortcuts,” said Alex Bastian.

Global arts also brings something new to students.

“Global Arts will explore different, interesting cultures around the world and their traditional art forms. The class will be studio based with students completing multiple art projects throughout the semester,” said Erin Bastian.

The art department decided to limit art history to every other year in order to make room for these classes and spare the department from having to remove more classes than absolutely necessary.

Besides the fundamental changes, some of the art classes will be getting new names.

General art will become Art I, and Studio Art I, II, and III will become Art II, III, and IV. Also, Commercial art will become digital art.

“We decided to change course names to make them more straightforward and understandable;

every year we have students asking what goes on in Studio Art, and since it’s basically a ‘next step’ from General Art – where many different types of artistic media are explored – we decided to combine [Gen.] Art and Studio Art into one clear track.

Same thing with Commercial Art, which is a name that has long confused students; therefore, we changed it to Digital Arts,” said Walton.

Overall, students have a lot to look forward to in terms of art classes next year.