Retro Poster project

My first lesson of Semester for Semester 2, was starting to feel a little stale. So I knew it needed to be revamped. 

The first lesson in photoshop needs to be 3 things:

1. Entertaining to get student buy in.

2. Not too hard so kids will give up. 

3. But teaches enough base skills so they are set up for success in photoshop in the future. 

The lesson I used to do were just Photo compositing images. where they just combine an animal, landscape and effect together. It was fun but nobody actually wanted to keep their final product. So I did some looking on the internet, and I found the retro poster design. 

Examples from the online

We start with a lesson on Copyright free images and sites and the importance of copyright but also how to find images taht are copy right free so you as an artist can make work without fear of taking someone else's property. 

Then we learn about poster design and the ingredients their poster will need. 

Here is the Visual Ingredient list each of their posters need. 

A fun element I challenged students to find was a "functional feature": Like a barcode, or QR code, or stamps. Starting show how design can have real world interactions, why also giving students an opportunity for interaction with your work. 

This is a video about downloading from copyright free sites. 

This is a video on how to actually do the poster design in Photoshop 

Here are student examples from this years assignment. 

I feel like this lesson was a pretty successful. I think the students were able to have a way to express themselves and make something that they were proud of which was my biggest goal. I don't like to have my students making "digital garbage". I want them to honor their time and create things they can be proud to share.

Black and white Assignment (Media Arts)

 I have a few black-and-white assignments that I give my students. This one was designed for my Media Arts class. It's a little more of an overview and focuses more on composition than on history or the camera settings. My Media Arts Class is a "Survey of Arts for Digital Art Classes" So we go through a lot in a short amount of time. 

I give a few prompts, so students know what to focus on, but the most successful of those prompts were the double exposure prompts. The students were able to create stunning pictures with the black-and-white double exposure. The other prompts were good for testing their skills but I found they had more substance than style. They had a lot of ideas but my the skills to make them look their best so the images were a little overthought. All students did a great job, but in future lessons, I would spend more time on setting up compositions and directing models. 

Here is a video on how to do double exposure. This is not the only way to do it but I found these versions to be the easiest. 

I like black and white for a prompt in most of my lessons because it is a pure form of composition. You remove the destruction of color and just focus on the contrast of the way the figures fill the image. 

Prompts for this lesson 

8 photos all soft edited
2 images- High Action 
2 images-Shadows
2 images-People and a story
2 images-Double exposure

Here are some examples of student work. 

AI Wrangler - Using AI and Design

 AI is everywhere. It hard to know where to start in the conversation, so I like to allow students to experiment in an easy program. This unit was designed to get kids thinking about AI, seeing it in action, and manipulating images. However, this is also the final AI use project, meaning every project after this cannot have an AI element at all. 

Other conversations: 

- How does AI affect your life?

- Where do you think AI is currently?

- What jobs are in danger?

- Do you think it is positive or negative?

- What already uses AI?

- What what the world look like if it waws banned?

The assignment: 

Create a series of 3 images that match thematically and visually. Each image in the series should be manipulated in some way by the student. they can't just use the image AI made, they either need to combine multiple images together, add other images, or correct AI mistakes in Photoshop. 

The following images were created by a student to show her progress, which is how the assignment should work. 

The images she created using Night Cafe

The final image she created, mixing the above images together.

The space fish images made by Night Cafe 

The final image

Here are a few examples of student series. 

The critique questions:

1. What is the story of your series 

2. Make a prediction on where you think AI will be in 5 years, and what will the world look like with it in it?