If you have friends with artistic souls and interests, consider enrolling them for a course in pottery, drawing, photography, etc. You might secretly think they have a big talent that is being wasted (and so might they! ), but sometimes people just need a little push to do the right thing. They will thank you once they become famous artists!
Do a little research in your local area and find suitable courses. If it is pottery, usually in such courses young potters apply the basic skills of hand building and wheel throwing to the creation of functional and decorative pottery pieces. There are also special courses devoted to wheel throwing only, where people are taught the beginning wheel throwing skills as well as advanced skills and design concepts. Hand building courses introduce students to the various hand building techniques and provide an excellent introduction to working with clay and understanding its unique properties.
Drawing is another field artists enjoy expressing themselves in. Such courses focus on drawing as a means of visual inquiry and build skills for articulating those visualisations. Students get to work with a variety of drawing media and processes and gain confidence in what they do. A lot of course tutors organise the students’ works exhibition at the end which helps to go out there and receive feedback from random people.
If your friend loves taking photographs and takes good ones as well, why not let her enjoy a photography course? There are lots of different types of courses out there, some cover the basics of black and white photography, camera operation, exposure, film processing, and printing. Some explore aesthetic and critical issues in photography; during others students spend some time in the darkroom and get involved in individual and group critiques of photographs produced during the course. More advanced photography courses cover portfolio development, ‘self style’ development, and potential career/education goals are investigated.
Whatever the interests are, there are numerous courses of which to avail. It only takes a moment to look them up and good will to go through them and some of them happen to be that first step towards a big career. Such a course will definitely make for a very thoughtful gift. If you have similar interests, join in and your gift’s recipient will feel even more encouraged.
