After the pandemic hit, services at Imagine! were forced to change to keep people safe. One such change was to switch from in-person to virtual classes. Every week or so, I would attend a class, take screenshots of the lesson with participants’ permission, and write a blog post. I wrote various posts on different courses but chose to include the art history post here because of my personal connection to the topic. The purpose of these posts was to increase the new program’s visibility and inspire people to sign up. I had to make sure the text was accessible as these particular blog posts were geared towards those with disabilities specifically. In addition to writing the text, I also used HTML and CSS to line up the images and paragraphs on the page.

Click on the following link to see the original blog post: Learning Art History Virtually and for the full text without the images, please refer to the block below:

Another great addition to the Imagine! Community and Employment Services Virtual Classes lineup is Art History with Chelsea Richards. This class goes through a different period of art each week, beginning with early human cave paintings. This week, Chelsea taught the class all about Ancient Egyptian art and how to draw hieroglyphs. In the beginning of the class, Chelsea led students through a worksheet with questions on what they might already know about Ancient Egypt so that they can see how much they learned at the end of class.

After they had established a good introduction on the topic, Chelsea brought up a video on Ancient Egyptian art. This video was a fantastic learning tool and contained several important facts to help the students learn more about the time period and the style of art.

After the video, Chelsea allowed the participants to explore different areas of Ancient Egyptian art that interests them. They looked at King Tutankhamun and other pharaohs, mummies, cartouches, and hieroglyphs.

Towards the end of class, the students were allowed to start drawing cartouches of their own! Cartouches are an Ancient Egyptian drawing that includes the name of a person within an oval outline. Chelsea also showed the class the cartouche necklace that had her own name on it.

This class is a great way to learn about Art History throughout time, and you can sign up too! Just click here to register for this class and more!