Most traditional Foundations courses involve exploration of the Elements of Design (line, shape, value, color, etc.) and the Principles of Design (unity, variety, repetition, balance, etc.) Assignments may take the form of basic exercises more than finished works of art. Value studies can use various drawing media to create 10-step value scales. Students may explore balance by collaging magazine images into symmetrical and non-symmetrical compositions. Color is a vast subject; exercises in a variety of media can explore complementary, primary, secondary, analogous and triadic color schemes.
Some Foundations courses aim to give the student an introduction to all possible art media as a basis for all modes of expression. A wire sculpture that enlarges a small object deals with scale, line, and a learning curve for manipulating the medium. Woodblock printmaking, where students carve into a piece of flat wood, roll it with ink, and make it into a print, is a fairly straight-forward introduction to edition-based art-making. The media you cover could include painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, collage or book-making.
Higher Art education is a realm that produces many stars in the contemporary art world. Many of today's conceptual artists deal with "New Media," which includes performance, installation (site-specific or transitory), sound, electronics, or social practice. Foundations students can sample this world by taping a public action or performance. A project involving making a piece of art that will degrade over time in a natural setting falls into this realm. Social practice can include the participation of large groups of non-artists to create a work the art student designed.
Some philosophies of art state that in order to break the rules with approaches like New Media, students must learn them first. A return to the past by applying lessons of Art History to a Foundations course introduces such rules. Fortunately, there are 20,000 years of Art History to choose from. The cave drawings of Lascaux and Chauvet teach lessons about line, shape and abstraction. The study of color and its relationship to value can begin by simplifying a work of Impressionism into a grid format. The "golden ratio" that appears in Greek architecture through paintings of the Renaissance, leads into projects about proportion and scale.