learn-career-art-making

Career Allsorts – Art Making Resource

Art can help us to communicate our ideas and envision our future.

Career Allsorts provides students with an opportunity to take time to ideate and express how they perceive their future of work as they begin to contemplate study and career choices.

This resource contains examples of student artwork from the Independent Schools Victoria art collection that represent 10 different career pathways and 2 selected core activities designed to support the artmaking process to create works for the Career Allsorts exhibition in March 2023.

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We hope the examples provided inspire students to think not only what they might do in the future, but where this work might take place and what tasks might be involved.

The selected examples of artworks are created in a range of different media including painting, drawing, ceramics, collage, woodwork, textiles and digital image. The representations include images of people with specific occupations and some of the things they produce, such as the food we eat or the clothing we wear.

All the activities use drawing as a core art competency and collage for those not confident with drawing. They can be created using pencil and paper or a range of printed images cut from magazines and junk mail. They can also be created as a digital drawings or collages.

Career Collage

This activity is designed to help students identify more than one career pathway for the future. By looking at images of artworks in this resource, discussing their choices and creating a collage of drawn/found images, students will start to document their ideas for future work/careers.

Materials required: A3 paper, greylead pencils, coloured pencils, textas, scissors, photo head shot in profile of student to be enlarged and traced, glue stick and print media, including magazines and junk mail.

Invite students to look at all the 10 types of work included in this resource, discussing how they think the artwork is made and what it is showing.

Ask them to choose their top 3 choices of type of work that look to be the most interesting to them.

Based on the top 3 choices, ask students to sketch or find images of some of the following; what tasks would be done, what would be produced and special tools, equipment and materials.

Choose favourite sketches and images, if black and white, they can add colour and fineliner outline. Cut out at least 6 (2 of each chosen type of work ) sketches and images after you have added colour and outline.

Next, get students to trace or draw the outline of their head in profile onto A3 paper. They can use an enlarged photo head shot to trace the outline from. If difficult to find profile head shots, students can trace around their own hands on A3 piece of paper.

Then place their selected images inside their head/hands outline and stick down. Text can be added for further detail and the background can be coloured or patterned to add further impact.

Career Superhero

This activity is designed to help students identify their strengths and skills when contemplating the world of work beyond school. As students reflect on their talents and skills, they may also start to consider the purposes of work choices and how they will contribute to their own and the futures of others.

Materials required: A3 paper, greylead pencils, coloured pencils, textas, scissors, comic strip template, glue stick, and print media, including magazines and junk mail.

Discuss: If you had a superpower what would it be? Do you think this power could help other people if you could do this as a career? Do you already have skills and talents from an after-school or in-school activity that you think could help?

Write: A simple story about how you would use your superpower, and sketch or find images to show the story.

Create: A portrait of your superhero, feel free to add labels and story text to add details. You could also create a comic strip of a workday in the life of your superhero by drawing or finding pictures for each scene. Add lots of colour and speech bubbles to tell the story. This activity also can be created as a stop motion animation or short film.