What's Going on in the Classroom: Computer Graphics Project

As promised, here is the post showing off the computer graphic skills of my students! Since this is an intro course to most of the mediums we teach at higher levels, we did a very simple project, but the kids still had so much fun with it and really used their imagination. Their assignment was to draw or paint an image that they then incorporated into a digital image that the found online (royalty free of course!) They used Adobe Photoshop to complete this assignment. Their goal was to combine their drawing with the found image as inconspicuously as possible. I have to say, even the ones that weren't very inconspicuous were still pretty cool! Check out a sampling of their work:

What's Going on in the Classroom: Pen and Ink

I believe this project is pretty run of the mill for a foundations course, but I wanted to share the work my students accomplished. They took the skills they had learned in graphite and charcoal and ran with them in pen and ink. I also had a couple of them talk me into letting them use color in the background (or negative space) which I think was an excellent addition! I limited their reference pictures to animals, plants, or insects and of course we used copy-right free images, but other than that anything was fair game. I do have to admit that I think most of them will be happy to move on to metals and three-dimensional art work for awhile! We need a break from drawing!

Feelings and Color

In our art curriculum, we are required to talk about showing feeling through color. I love this concept! The kids really latch onto it and it makes sense to them. For this project, we had a conversation about how different colors can make you feel or how we associated different colors with different feelings. We made sure to talk about how people can think about colors differently and perhaps some colors can show more than one feeling. Then I showed them examples of paintings of musical instruments. We followed that up with some good old graphite drawing! Pictures of musical instruments were passed out and students picked one to use as inspiration for their drawing.

As you can see, we have some amazing artists in our fourth grade classes! Then we moved on to the part of the project that I think makes it so interesting and exciting for kids. The students had to pick out a song, any song as long as it was school appropriate. Then they listened to it and decided what feelings the song made them feel. I had the kids do this as homework, I didn't want to have to listen to all those songs!

The kids came back with songs and the feelings that those songs inspired and we worked through what colors they should use. They loved this process, they were so geeked to choose a song and decided how to represent the feelings with color.

We broke out the watercolor paints and got to work after a brief talk about where to place color so that they instrument didn't become part of the background and it was really the focal point, and stood out, etc...

Most students finished the background in the first class, some even finished the background and the instrument. For those that had both done, the next step was to highlight the instrument even more. We used oil pastels on the instrument only, to make it pop out of the background. We talked about many ways to do that (coloring it all in, using designs and patterns, outlining etc..) 

What I like most about the finished products is that the effects are so varied, but you can tell that there is real feeling behind the colors and the way these pieces were painted.