Students complete activities from the Successful bodies of work website to:
- familiarise themselves with the assessment guidelines, requirements and limitations of the body of work as a practical examination
- learn about the qualities of successful student practice, referring to videos of past students discussing their body of work, and reviewing examples of outstanding bodies of work using the Inside ARTEXPRESS website.
- consider the steps they will need to take to initiate their own artmaking practice and begin to develop their ideas and intentions for the body of work.
Students begin concept mapping, initial research and working through ideas.
Student ideas are refined and developed through research into the practice of significant artists when making connections which inform their own artmaking experiments and development.
Students should situate their investigations within one or more of the frames (subjective, structural, cultural or postmodern), consider relationships within the agencies of the artworld (artist, artwork, world and audience), and reflect on their own developing practice. Students might refer to scaffolds for artmaking practice (PDF 654 KB), the conceptual framework (PDF 146 KB), and the frames (PDF 5.8 MB) as they develop their ideas and experiments.
Students use their visual arts process diaries (VAPDs) to plan and record evidence of their material and conceptual experiments and preliminary artmaking.
Students may develop a detailed proposal to plan their artmaking and outline key ideas to explore, including material and conceptual intentions.
Teachers lead demonstrations of artmaking techniques and practices to support student technical skill building in specific areas, guided by student need. For example, the teacher might lead a painting workshop with a group of students who are investigating painting practices as part of their body of work development, demonstrating wet on wet, blending and a range of other specific techniques.