Gbemilake Artz

At the Buell Children's Museum in Pueblo, Colorado, children and their guardians partake in arts and crafts.
Arts and crafts describes a wide variety of activities involving making things with one's own hands. Arts and crafts is usually a hobby. Some crafts (art skills) have been practised for centuries, others are more recent inventions. A quote by Apoorva Rathore: Art cannot be taught, it comes from thinking. But it can be improved by practice.

Both children and adults enjoy arts and crafts. Children in schools may learn skills such as woodworking, wood carving, sewing, or making things with all sorts of material. Many community centres and schools have evening or day classes and workshops where one can learn arts and craft skills.

Although "crafts" today are usually hobbies enjoyed by amateurs, the word was used many centuries ago by professional people who had a guild system. Young people were learned from a master-craftsman (i.e. they were "apprenticed"), and they often took many years to learn their skills to perfection.

Crafts involving textiles

Crafts involving wood, metal or clay

Crafts involving paper or canvas

Crafts involving plants

Other crafts
What is Art? and/or What is Beauty?
The following answers to this artful question each win a random book.
Art is something we do, a verb. Art is an expression of our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and desires, but it is even more personal than that: it’s about sharing the way we experience the world, which for many is an extension of personality. It is the communication of intimate concepts that cannot be faithfully portrayed by words alone. And because words alone are not enough, we must find some other vehicle to carry our intent. But the content that we instill on or in our chosen media is not in itself the art. Art is to be found in how the media is used, the way in which the content is expressed.
What then is beauty? Beauty is much more than cosmetic: it is not about prettiness. There are plenty of pretty pictures available at the neighborhood home furnishing store; but these we might not refer to as beautiful; and it is not difficult to find works of artistic expression that we might agree are beautiful that are not necessarily pretty. Beauty is rather a measure of affect, a measure of emotion. In the context of art, beauty is the gauge of successful communication between participants – the conveyance of a concept between the artist and the perceiver. Beautiful art is successful in portraying the artist’s most profound intended emotions, the desired concepts, whether they be pretty and bright, or dark and sinister. But neither the artist nor the observer can be certain of successful communication in the end. So beauty in art is eternally subjective.
Wm. Joseph Nieters, Lake Ozark, Missouri
Works of art may elicit a sense of wonder or cynicism, hope or despair, adoration or spite; the work of art may be direct or complex, subtle or explicit, intelligible or obscure; and the subjects and approaches to the creation of art are bounded only by the imagination of the artist. Consequently, I believe that defining art based upon its content is a doomed enterprise.
Now a theme in aesthetics, the study of art, is the claim that there is a detachment or distance between works of art and the flow of everyday life. Thus, works of art rise like islands from a current of more pragmatic concerns. When you step out of a river and onto an island, you’ve reached your destination. Similarly, the aesthetic attitude requires you to treat artistic experience as an end-in-itself: art asks us to arrive empty of preconceptions and attend to the way in which we experience the work of art. And although a person can have an ‘aesthetic experience’ of a natural scene, flavor or texture, art is different in that it is produced. Therefore, art is the intentional communication of an experience as an end-in-itself. The content of that experience in its cultural context may determine whether the artwork is popular or ridiculed, significant or trivial, but it is art either way.
One of the initial reactions to this approach may be that it seems overly broad. An older brother who sneaks up behind his younger sibling and shouts “Booo!” can be said to be creating art. But isn’t the difference between this and a Freddy Krueger movie just one of degree? On the other hand, my definition would exclude graphics used in advertising or political propaganda, as they are created as a means to an end and not for their own sakes. Furthermore, ‘communication’ is not the best word for what I have in mind because it implies an unwarranted intention about the content represented. Aesthetic responses are often underdetermined by the artist’s intentions.
Mike Mallory, Everett, WA
The fundamental difference between art and beauty is that art is about who has produced it, whereas beauty depends on who’s looking.
Of course there are standards of beauty – that which is seen as ‘traditionally’ beautiful. The game changers – the square pegs, so to speak – are those who saw traditional standards of beauty and decided specifically to go against them, perhaps just to prove a point. Tak