IMAGINATION AS A Visual Stimulus AND It's Role in Teaching Design to Art Education Students at Aswan University

Stimulating the imagination is one of the most important motivations for expression in the visual arts, as imagination plays an important role in achieving a unique visual image that has no equal. Imagination is considered a refuge for expressing our invisible world, which gives us the opportunity to be creative and change reality in a different way. Imagination is linked to artistic creativity. As it is a means to refresh the mind to create distinguished works of art that represent the artist’s self and express his inner personality linked to his psychological and emotional feelings, imagination is one of the elements that make up artistic creativity, as it creates a work that is characterized by distinction and uniqueness. Therefore, imagination is a complementary element in determining the aesthetic concepts of art, as it is associated with artistic creativity. Where emotion blends with idea and style to the point of dreaming and imagination, interacting with levels of understanding and cultural and social legacies that impose acceptance of reality and its reformulation based on the possibilities of aesthetic meaning that contain visual and intellectual scenes. Through the absolute freedom of using imagination to express ideas, art education has evolved. Imagination has become an important part of art education, becoming a visual stimulus that stimulates creativity and innovation. The current research addresses the concept of imagination as a visual stimulus and how to leverage it in teaching design to art education students. Through imagination, art education students can create artworks that reflect their visions and ideas.

Since art education seeks to develop creativity and innovation among art education students, the current research has focused on developing creativity by using imagination as a formative stimulus through the design curriculum. The research has been directed towards the descriptive analytical approach through the theoretical and quasi-experimental framework by applying a practical experiment carried out by the second-year students in the Department of Art Education, where the applied framework included a group of students’ works in the design course, numbering (13) works executed in gouache colours on Canson, and these works were described and analysed.