Lets start the year!

When you get a brand new group of student into your classroom, you have no idea what their sill level might be. This is significant in all art classes, but you really see the disparity in Digital art classes.

I started off the class year with a survey using Google forms, and I was surprised to find quite a few of my student had actually never taken a picture with a real camera, only with cell phones. In fact out of 100 students 11% hadn't used a camera.

Now, don't get me wrong, cell phones are growing and becoming very advanced. That being said, there are some obvious things a camera phone just cannot accomplish. For example: any form of optical zooming, shutter speed of any kind, controlling the ISO, and aperture.

In the Digital Art department, out of 100 students 30% rated their photoshop abilities 5 or above. As a professional who has been using Photoshop for 10 years, I would rate myself at a 7. You will find that a lot of students have had some experience in photoshop, but photoshop is such a particular program that almost all of them don't realize that what they do through entire project will effect them in the end. This is where my data of experience in photoshop was inaccurate. Because experience in photoshop didn't alway equate to proper photoshop protocol.

So to start our year we had a great assignment, and what I think is really what photoshop is known for, and that is Photoshopping animals into places they don't belong.

The assignment was to collect
- a cool background
- an animal that you can't believe exists
- a an effect (lighting, rainbows, sunbeams, and sparkles)

Then they were to bring the image into Photoshop:
10"X 8" inches
at 300 resolution
RGB color

They then had to edit the picture to make all three of those elements fit together in the picture.

This assignment is fun and it is also very revealing about a student ability to work in photoshop as well as seeing who has a natural Photoshop skills.

Here are some examples of some awesome student work.