Free Art Classes

University & College Art Courses Online

Free art classes let you explore a particular aspect of the artistic movements through history, including the style, technique, and influences of the artists in question. To understand the artistry of a time, you often need to understand the history of that era and the leading figures who influenced the painter's or sculptor's time. To illustrate this point, I wanted to provide you with a list of sample free online art courses available to anyone with a computer. Study any one of these and you'll understand the plastic and visual arts a little better. Each also gives a clue about inspiration and influence and how these combine to form an artist's creativity.

Art and The Creative Spark

If you want to learn about the process of creativity, you can take a free class from MIT OpenCourseWare called the Creative Spark. Read about what artists and writers have sad about their own creative process, while learning what scientists and scholars have found out in the course of their studies and examinations of the subject. If you are an artist of any type and you are having trouble with a creative block, this is the free course for you.

Delacroix Course at Open University

This 16-hour class at the Open University website is an introduction to Eugene Delacroix, a French Romantic artist who influenced the Impressionist painters who came after him. Living from 1798 to 1863, Eugene Delacroix focused on the individual in his Romantic paintings. His depictions of the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Empire helped rally liberal Europe to help the Greek side in the war. His Liberty Leading the People remains a symbol of French patriotism and sits in the Louvre to this day, while his paintings of Frederic Chopin and George Sand are often used as portraits of these great romantic artists in other fields of creativity.

Goya Free Art Course

The Goya Free Art Class gives you insight into his influences and the French invasion which so affected his haunting art. Art and history are so often intertwined and the Francisco Goya course is a signal case in study of that idea.

Musee de Louvre

The Louvre Museum course by Open University teaches how the 35,000 different pieces of art were collected in the world's most famous art museum. This intermediate course is only 4 hours long.

Art in Renaissance Venice

I wanted to include this study to show that advanced free classes are also available. This study of the Renaissance Art in Venice not only challenges your notions of what Italian art was in the Renaissance, but gives a glimpse of how artistic movements are formed and what influences them.

Free Online Art Courses

Those Internet art courses listed above are just a few of the examples of what you'll find online. If you're an artist or a student of art and you don't have the money to take college courses right now, you should be studying one or two of these free art classes all the time. Make a list of the art subjects you want to study, then start searching for free classes about those subjects. I guarantee you'll find them.