Zentangles (The first Digital Drawing assignment)

 

The first project I do in my digital drawing class is designed to do 5 things:

1. Teach kids technique for tracing 

2. getting kids used to the Wacom Tablets

3. Getting students to practice their line quality 

4. Student get to practice Zentangles 

5. Training the brain to convert the way their hand eye coordination to the Wacom tablet from the typical drawing paper. 

The program I use is Fire Alpaca which is free to download digital Drawing program, that is lighter than photoshop and easier for new artists to understand. I do teach at least 4 different programs, I do start with Fire Alpaca because I think it is the easiest to use. 

If you are using iPads in your school, obviously Procreate is the best program, but in the free app world Metibang is a good free option. 

The assignment:

1. choose an animal photo

2. Trace animal

3. Separate animal into at least 7 sections

4. Fill the section with at least 7 unique zentangle designs with focus on line size strength and line quality.

Examples of Student work. 

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.