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 on how to actually do the poster design in Photoshop
Here are student examples from this years assignment.
