The first weekend in October is always MCAD's Portfolio review day, where they bring in colleges from all over the country to look at student portfolios and give feedback.
Not many students are able to give up their Sunday to go to this event, however A representative from The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts reached out to us for a visit.
She came to the school, and spoke to my Digital Photography class about the school. It was cool to hear a little bit about the history of the school and to see their beautiful grounds.
For the second hour she did a portfolio review with my AP Digital Art students. It was very helpful for the students to hear advice from someone other than me. It was nice for them to get a second opinion. One student even changed her focus, because she saw a stronger pattern in her artwork than her original concentration topic.
So we have been busy learning all sorts of tricks in Digital Drawing a Painting. The First few weeks I was trying to see how well Traditional art skills translated to Digital art skills. The transition was... eh... Students needs a little more direct instruction for digital drawing.
So we went through a series of days, where each day we learned a new technique, and we created a small easy work of art to test the technique out with.
This day was Bubbles, the skills we learned were transparency, and glow. This lesson is all about technique and skill building, so the projects are just fun short 45 min long lessons that carry no deeper meaning other than ooo pretty. However this lesson also really build confidence in skills they can apply to other lessons in the future.
I found this great illustrated step by step lesson on how to draw bubbles, so if you wanna try it yourself... here it is.
Black and white photography a Staple in the art photography. This timeless style has really made a strong comeback with its use in Instagram and other phone editing sites. This was an assignemnt I did with 8th grade to introduce them to the basics of Black and white photography.
This Video is great for teaching kids how to find a great black and white image.
My personal suggestion
- Find contrast- Look for the dark against the light in contrast to one another
- Find texture- that is all
- Don't think that a boring picture will become more interesting in black and white.
- Don't worry about color, think in shades.
This is a great Video is great for teaching a little about the right and wrong ways of editing black and white images. Many people think, "How can there be a wrong way to turn a photo black and white?" Well This video will let you know.
My favorite part is talking about how if you just take out the saturation you are giving yourself a very flat image with little to no value throughout your image.
So here are a few examples of student work. They had to turn in 10 images, that had all been edited softly(Which means no crazy filters and no collage style editing)
This was more work then they usually have, but I decided they might need more to keep them busy. This was also to teach them to start taking more than just a few pictures. It forces them to stay organized and to look at an area in a new way.
Side note: All these picture were taken at the school grounds, they have to get pretty creative on how they see their school, to make it interesting.
I hope you enjoy. If you want to stay up to date, don't forget to the "Follow" the blog.
7th grade is still getting used to digital art and while most of the work we uses our own cameras, sometimes we need to look to the internet for sources and references. And while we talk about the public domain, copyright, trademark, and open source material, we also talk about copyright infringement.
And who makes for a better conversation than the ever enthralling story of Shepherd Fairey and the Hope poster.
Shepard Fairey is a self proclaimed Punk Rock artist. He worked our of skate park for a long time and became known for his OBEY stickers he would put all over town. All his work since them has included his signature that incorporates the OBEY stamp.
However he made a fateful decision before a the Caucasus during the 2008 elections Shepherd made the "Hope" poster. Which is now know as the second most iconic work of political artwork of all time only surpassed by the "Uncle Sam wants you" Poster.
But after its viral popularity Mannie Garcia of the associated press realized that the picture of Obama looked just like a picture he took of Obama, and he was not given any credit, so he took Fairey to court in a copy right battle.
The judge was leaning more in favor of Shepherd Fairey, becasue his was was truly transformative, however near the end of the case an intern discovered Fairey had deleted details of how the image was collected. The judge then charged Fairey with evidence tampering, and the case was closed.
Fairey style is used and reused for many parody purposes, and it offers a great way to teach student a cautionary tail on copyright, and really it is better to be safe than sorry.
The Shepherd Fairy hope poster style is copied all the time as you can see in this interest Goku creation.
Shepherd Fairey is doing fine however, his fame from the Hope poster sky rocketed his career. He has just recently released a new series that is gaining political traction. His "We Are The People" series is very present in today's political atmosphere.
The students get to find or take images for the hope poster parody project. I show them how to search images from the creative commons. https://creativecommons.org/
Then we follow along with this style of hope poster design to create our images.
And here are a few of the final results!!
Enjoy
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