Hocus Pocus, Illustrator FOCUS

We started right in polishing up some older projects and finishing up our BTW. Even though everybody came in a bit sleepy and draggy (and not IN to the whole SNOW thing), it didn't take long for us to get warmed up and in the spirit of things.

Juan came in with most of his work already done! We gave him some comments to push him a bit further and he started working on making his polished project a bit more "polished"--so that the objects looked integrated within the images. Patrick had two different versions of his BTW website, and when he was comparing the two, he was able to decide right away that one looked better than the other because it was more simple and easier to understand. Nandi was really working hard not to give in to the initial frustration that she feels when starting a project, and she is learning to push through it and trust that she can create awesome work. Everyone else was working very hard to finish their Behind the Wheel project.

We then took our Road Test--it was fun to watch the student's progress and it will be interesting to see the results.

Werwolf Bar Mitzva! Illustrator becomes an adult!

As Tracy Jordan sings in the popular TV show 30 Rock, "Werwolf Barmitzva! Spooky, Scary!"

It's "Spooky Scary" how GREAT all the Freshmen in Chou and Eliza's class are! And they proved it today by having a wonderful and productive session.

We started off the morning with an AWESOME Illustrator Jeopardy that helped us review for our permit test (Yay!). There were some questions that NOBODY knew, but we did know a lot of them. (Yay for us!) Then we watched a You Tube video of how to make an illustrator image that looks as real as a photograph. Can you believe it? Amazing!! It must take HOURS!.

Then, after our break, we had some work time to polish up a former project and to work on the BTW. Everyone was hard at work and it seemed like everyone remembered most of the tools and was feeling comfortable with using the program. AJ showed his fantastic BTW project and everyone was impressed.

We spent the rest of the class period just working on our BTW projects, on finishing some projects to display at the Holiday Luncheon and on our permit test.

Session 5 - Photoshop (Chris/Ryan)

Much of what we want to do with the rest of the Photoshop unit is to keep the interest of the students by having them tell us what they want to learn within this application. Our Day 5 quiz addresses these concerns by asking for the student input.

Unfortunately, at 9am....students only want to input themselves back into bed. We did not receive much input from the students, but I'm hoping that we get some e-mail responses from them to help us direct the course in the future.

The students are starting to work on the web layout for their Behind the Wheel. Students are also trying to polish some of the previous in-class homework assignments. There is no real development at this time because many of the students were just starting to work on their projects. As of now, the students seem to be receptive to the project assignment...seemingly more to the actual design of the website versus polishing pre-existing assignments, which is interesting considering the web design is easily the more difficult portion.

Chou and Eliza's Class: Where the Wild ThANgs Are

Everyone came in all ready to go and we hit the Learn@UW quiz right off the bat. Chou helped us do a review of what we have learned to do with Illustrator. Some of the students came up to demonstrate how to do things. Besma was right on it with the "text on a path". She showed us what to do and Chou narrated her actions so everyone could review together. Cool!!

Eliza started a free draw lesson about point of view. The goal was to see how different the same picture can look different from two different points of view, for example the difference between a ant looking at a cookie and a person looking down on a cookie near his feet.

Theme and Variation is the focus point for the art concept that the class went over. We looked at many examples of images that had a repeated visual theme but where variations were used by changed the size, color or position to create an interesting image.

Then everyone thought about a super power they would like to have and they worked on making an image that would illustrate that super power (while also keeping in mind the idea of theme and variation).

Juan's "Absorbing Power"






Aubrey's power: to lift a garbage truck with his mind

Nandi: Superwoman on the moon (and black hole in space)

After break we looked at some of the images to see what everyone came up with, we did a critique and then we worked on the Behind the Wheel project.

Clara has a good start with her web design:

And Patrick too:

Photoshop Day 4

This morning session started a bit different than usual--that is, instead of a Learn@UW Quiz, we kicked it off with blogging time from last session--since the Permit test took up most of the time, the students didn't get the chance to blog about their Compositing projects.

Today's session was all about drawing in Photoshop using the Pen Tool to create vector images. The pen tool can easily be seen as one of the most complicated tools to use throughout all of the Adobe Products, but with that said, it can also easily be seen as one of the most powerful--and the students definitely saw one side of its awesome abilities today with some of the Photoshop vector illustration examples that were shown to them.

So as always, after the pen tool was introduced and instructions were given on how it is used, the challenges of the day were introduced and a lot of the students got started on them right away, working straight through their first break.

The challenges for today were "Comic/Coloring Book Style," where students could either draw an image by hand, scan it, and vector/color it in Photoshop, or use one of the provided sketches to vector/color in Photoshop, and "Fix Your Photo: Vectoring Edition," where students had the option to take an image of themselves or someone else and "vectorize" it, or make it look like a cartoon (a lot of the students were really interested in this challenge).

Check out some of their cool pen tool vector projects:


Here's Jose's vector illustration project:



He did a great job of outlining or "digitally inking" the contours of the original sketch of this image, as well as the coloring-in of it.




Here's Dylan's vector illustration project:



He made great use of the "fill path" technique with the pen tool as well as adding a customized gradient background, and although the illustration isn't complete, he got off to a great start.



Here's Collin's vector illustration project:





He did a remarkable job of "vectorizing" this image of Tupac Shakur with a great attention to detail and shading.


Class ended with the usual class blogs from this session where the students uploaded their projects they'd been working and wrote about how they went about creating them. Once again overall it was another good session for the morning Photoshop Unit and the students walked away with some newly learned Photoshop skills.

Illustrator rocks perspective!

Congrats to those in costume today!

We got started on time! There were some You Tube videos about perspective drawing running on the screen when everyone was coming in to the room and then everyone took a Learn @ UW quiz. The first question was what the difference was between vector vs. rastor art. (What? The students couldn't give the answer immediately? We definitely need to review that concept a bit more!)

Then we looked at a lot of different things: images, videos and a powerpoint that showed perspective drawing. Everyone took a few minutes to make a simple perspective drawing on a sheet of paper.

After we took a break, we learned about The Rule of Odds.

The Rule of Odds is that the human eye is more attracted to an odd number of shapes than to an even number. After talking about why, we guessed that maybe it was because of the human face and the fact that we feel at home looking at two eyes and a mouth (an odd number of shapes). We aren't sure why, really. We looked at some examples of Paul Cezanne's art because he used the Rule of Odds in a lot of his paintings.

Chou showed us an AWESOME demo of how he creates a design with Illustrator. Everyone (even if we were all feeling a bit like we won't ever be able to do it like Chou) worked on making a t-shirt design. The students were working on some great stuff and everyone seemed to enjoy the activity as well. Way to go us!

Then, after our second break, we got serious and took a permit test. How did we do? We'll have to wait and see!

We had some blog time and some time to keep working on our t-shirt or web designs, then it was off to lunch (Potbelly's! Yum!).

Overall, it was a pretty darn good day: We learned some stuff, we had some fun, we used technology and we made some cool designs.

Photoshop Session Three!

The session went over rather well.

Oh, more....yes, more. So in our class (Chris and Ryan) we went over the concept of compositing (blending two or more images). Some of the best examples of this include what you may see on Conan O'Brien:

So you have Sienna Miller and Daniel Craig...



Which then when composited looks like this:



A face only a mother could love...

Now, we did not expect our students to make something as disturbingly awesome as what you see above. However, many of our students took to the exercise well, and made some pretty cool pictures in the process. Take DJ for example, who used a smiley face as part of one of our exercises and blended it into another background, the before and after is below:

Before:


After:



Colin took a picture from the album cover of Michael Jackson's Thriller and combined it with headshots of students from the class:



Ibadete is planning on making an army of clones to storm a soccer pitch! The work in progress is below, but I can't wait to see the final product!



Especially in Ibadete's work, notice how well her multiple copies are blended in with the other Ibadetes. The work is so well done that it actually looks like there are five of them in this photo.

Besides compositing, the students also learned to work with HDR and adding filters to their pictures. Although to be sure, the students really took to the compositing images above all the other activities, and spent the majority of their time doing mashups.

In the third part of the class, we had our permit test, but beforehand did a quick mock up of Jeopardy to get the kids thinking about the materials. In general, the students did very well in the quiz and will do much, much better on the 2nd permit test once they learn more about Photoshop.

If anything, there should be one very core lesson to learn combined with activity during these sessions. Photoshop is a hard program to learn, and many of the students, especially those who do not use Photoshop during the week (although they should) seem to have to start all over again getting used to the program before they can start the activity. But overall, the class took to compositing, and I hope they keep up with the great projects in the coming weeks!

Color me Illustrator: Day Three

Aneda's Taste Drawing

"bitter, relaxing, sweet"

The first thing we did was a warm-up free draw. Eliza gave everyone a selection of candy and dried fruit. She told the students to use Illustrator draw whatever they wanted and to let the flavors inspire their drawings. Everyone came up with very interesting drawings using various colors. Some students used the warp and twirl tool and others found symbols to add to their drawing. Some students were drawing more abstract images that reflected their sensory experience, while Kim drew a plum and a peach because those were the fruit flavors she was tasting.









Besma's taste drawing

Aubrey's taste drawing
"Toughts provoked by Eliza giving us sugar"

Next, Chou demonstrated live trace and live paint. He showed how to upload images and then how to change the settings in live trace to affect how the image looks. Then he demonstrated the way to select colors and add them to the image using the live paint bucket.

After that, Eliza talked about how to use color effectively so we can make really cool designs. She showed the color wheel and the students identified the primary, secondary and tertiary colors. Then we talked about what complimentary colors are: they are the colors directly across from each other on the color wheel. Analogous colors are next to each other on the color wheel. We learned that different color combinations create different moods and feelings in a design. Also, Eliza explained that to make a really interesting picture, the colors can be used in the proportion of 3:2:1. That means that you choose one color for about half of your image, then choose the complimentary color for 1/3 of your image and last you choose another color for contrast and use that for only 1/6 of the image. We looked at several examples to help us see what that means.

After break, everyone worked on images using live trace and live paint. Sometimes it was frustrating because when you don' t know how to use the tools yet, you have to keep experimenting and trying different things and sometimes it is hard to make it look like you want it to, so you have to just keep trying. The first images were line art, some of them were cartoon characters. We all chose the image we wanted to work with and practiced using the tools.

Kim's Livetrace drawing

Nick's Livetrace drawing

The next project was a really interesting one. We got together in groups and chose an image to use to express the four seasons and then we each worked on one season. It was really interesting to see what everyone did with their images.

During break time, our friends from the Photoshop class came over to check out what we were doing and then some of us went over to see what they were working on. Everyone was making such great stuff! And it was fun to show each other our work and talk about what we were doing.

After our break we had a little more time to work on our Four Season images. Then we did a class critique. Because the images were about the four seasons, a lot of people used analogous colors and the ideas were often based more on warm and cool color schemes.

Clara's Four Seasons

Patrick's Four Seasons

Juan M's "Winter Flower Flurry"

Itzel's Autumn Rose

Nandi and Saige's four seasons drawing

Lucy's four season's drawing

At last! Behind the Wheel work time! This was just an introduction to our BTW, but we thought about what kind of website we want to make. We looked at the web designs we started last week and some students deicded to keep the design they started with, but others were looking at other ideas. Then everyone worked on their blog and posted an artifact from the day's work (or tried to!)

Overall it was a very productive day. Everyone did at least three drawings and did a great job too!

Photoshop Session 2

This session of Photoshop was all about Enhancement & amp; Restoration. So we covered a lot of things relative to that topic, such as the presence of balance in an image, the concept of "beauty" both within an image as well as in general, the importance of "keeping your project live" by using different layers for different changes, and finally we talked about some Photoshop controversies that are out there and knowing when enough is enough (if there is indeed a limit) in editing/enhancing an image.

As a related challenge for this session's topic, students were to have their own photographs taken before for them to work with. Unfortunately, there were some technical difficulties with the cameras we were using (apparently the batteries were feeling a bit fatigued and needed to be re-juiced) and we weren't able to take all the students' pictures, thus not enabling us to let the students use them in their challenges for the day as planned. However, we were prepared with an alternative: the students were supplied with a folder filled with old, tarnished, and esthetically challenged, un-edited photos to work with and practice some of the great enhancement & restoration Photoshop tools, adjustments and techniques they were exposed to.

Check out the before-and-after projects that some of the students were working on!

Here's DJ's before & after project:

He did a great job of increasing the lighting in the shadows of the image so that everything could become a lot more visible!





Here's Dylan's before-and-after project:

He made good use of his sharpening tool in this one in order to establish the contours of the cat's face more!
















And here are Natalia and Ibadete's before-and-after projects (Although they both used the same image to use work on, they took two completely different approaches to it):

Ibadete did a flawless job of editing and changing the woman's eye color as well as giving the photo an overall soft-light effect which really compliments the woman's expression and facial stance in
this image!

And Natalia did a remarkable job of changing the woman's hair color, eye color, and enhancing the highlights on the face!
















We might have to let those magazine image editors out there know about some possible new competition coming their way. =)



At the end of the day, the students were asked to blog about their experiences with Photoshop, and once they were all able to get into Blogspot they were hard at it. They’re sure to have some interesting things to say, and us instructors are looking forward to reading them!

Freshmen Illustrator Sept. 26, 2009

As the class started and we watched a video on Jackson Pollock, an abstract artist. He was one of the first artists to begin the style of art called abstract expressionism. We talked about what art is. Does it have to be from a real picture? Does it have to be an object? Then the students used Illustrator to experiment with different types and thicknesses of brushes to create a drawing inspired by Jackson Pollock's style. Eliza demonstrated the different types of brushes and did an example drawing on the screen.

Clara's Pollock drawing

Sophia's Pollock Drawing

Aubrey's Pollock Drawing

Then Chou showed the students how to grab free vector pictures from the web and use those pictures and turn them into symbols.

Eliza then talked about how artists use lines, not just straight lines, but all kinds of lines and how they can be represented on a art board. We looked at a neoclassical painting to see how horizontal and vertical lines express stability and then we looked at a romantic period painting to see how curvy and diagonal lines express stability.

After the break, Chou showed the students CSSZenGarden.com, where they can look at example designs. Then the students worked on creating their own designs for a website. Chou and Eliza asked the students to work on their own without assistance for the first 10 minutes . . . and the majority of the students started coming up with great designs all on their own!

Besma's web design

Juan M's web design

Everyone then blogged about what art is, and what they think about abstract art.

First Day of Freshmen Illustrator Course

On September 12, 2009, half of the class of 2013 had their first Illustrator class. During the Education section, Chou gave us a brief introduction to some of the basic Illustrator tools. Then Eliza gave us a lesson about the Rule of Thirds. Both lessons seemed to go quite well and the students were listening and engaged. Some of the students wanted more explanation about the Rule of Thirds, so Chou did a drawing on the whiteboard to illustrate the concept again.

After a short break, we moved on to our challenge list. First, Chou talked about each of the challenges and then everyone started working on the list: make a penguin picture that illustrates the Rule of Thirds, use the stroke and fill tools to alter some interesting text, use the pen tool to connect the dots, and use the Radio Tower image to practice typing on a path. The students also used the warp tools to make their penguin pictures interesting, and they practiced making backgrounds to the images. Most of the students didn’t finish all of the projects, but they did end up spending a lot of time experimenting with different tools and effects with their penguin drawings. Some students were able to finish the connect-the-dots projects.

Nick's Radio Tower--type on a path

Marci's Snake
pen tool

Nandi's Penguin

Rule of Thirds

During the certification period, we did our first critique. Chou talked about not taking the critique to heart and not trash talking, and Eliza talked about phrases we could use to talk about the artwork. Then, the class looked at penguin drawings and commented on what the artist did well and what the artist could improve. We mostly focused on deciding if the artists applied the Rule of Thirds, but we also talked about the overall picture. Sophia used space really well by using the symbols library and changing the sizes of things to show distance. Saige had created a drawing with a horizon line that followed the Rule of Thirds and had also used space to show distance.

Sophia's Penguin
Notice the effect creation of a sense of space by resizing elements from the symbols library.
Notice, too, the effective placement of the penguin according to the Rule of Thirds.

Saige's Penguin
Notice the horizon and foreground set in accordance to the Rule of Thirds.
Notice, too, the placement of the penguin and the hut in accordance to the Rule of Thirds.

Overall, it was an excellent day. The students learned a lot, and even though we were not able to get to everything on the challenge list, the projects turned out well.

Photoshop Day 1: Chris, Tony and Ryan

Today was the first day of our Freshman Photoshop session, and it showed. Everyone was a little sluggish, a little tired and a little cautious about being here on what is arguably a beautiful day. Chris, being the unit coordinator and the lead for today's session, was having none of this negativity. Chris is able to work a room, and help people learn at the same time,which are both great skills in a teacher. Trying to get the students interested, Chris made sure to crack jokes, keep things educational but not too stuffy, and the students were able to catch on and get to work.

During the Education section, the students were told about the wide variety of ways Photoshop skills could be useful to them, including a great inspiring list of possible careers that Photoshop could be used in. Following their brief and general Photoshop intro, the students were introduced to the Design Concept of the day (The Rule of Thirds), as well as the Best Practice of the Day (Keeping Files Organized). In those lessons, students were taught the importance of the composition of an image to make it more visually pleasing. Students also learned the importance of keeping their files organized so that they can easily keep track of all of their Photoshop files and projects to refer back to/edit/re-edit any time!

Natalia did a great job of saving a version of her project in the original .psd format as well as in a finished .jpg format. This will not only allow her to always have a backup of her original project, but also to go back and re-work/re-edit her project at any time!

After those two short lessons, the challenges for the day were introduced and explained, and the students were released from their ITA work mind-frames with a 10-minute break (during which time it should be noted that a lot of students already began/continued exploring different things in Photoshop anyway!)

During the Exploration section, the students had 3 project challenges to work on/ choose from. The first challenge incorporated skills they learned from the Rule of Thirds lesson which was called "Crop Down A Big One" where they were to pick 3 to 5 photos from a folder provided, and crop them down using the Rule of Thirds in order to make them more visually pleasing. Unfortunately there are no examples to show for this challenge because none of the students chose to do this project (which is totally understandable seeing as how much more exciting the other two projects were).
The second challenge the students could work on was the "Pacman Fix." In this one, students were to use the distorted image of the Pacman game screenshot provided, and fix up/edit/manipulate various parts of the image (such as fix the broken blue borders, bring some of the pac-pallets back, move some the ghosts around, etc) using the list provided.
The third challenge was "Lil' Wayne's Road to Redemption" where, using the image of Lil' Wayne's tattooed face, the students were to use the same knowledge of Photoshop tools and navigation to completely remove all of Lil' Wayne's tattoos from his face ad make it appear as if they were never there. As an added bonus, the students could replace his "grilled out" diamond teeth with a full set of pearly whites!

Below are examples of the challenges that students did. Check 'em out!!

Pacman Fix Challenge

Provided Image

Dylan's Pacman Fix Project

Dylan did a great job of not only regenerating the boards and pac-pallets, but he also did well in mimicking how the original Pacman game begins (all of the ghosts in the center box, the number of lives, etc.)

Erica's Pacman Fix Project

Erica really demonstrated her knowledge and understanding of the assignment and how to use the tools introduced not only in the way she successfully rebuilt the Pac Board and pallets, but also in how effective she was with moving the Blue and Pink ghosts from their original placement and seamlessly re-patching the area to make it seem as if they were never there.


Lil' Wayne's Road to Redemption Challenge

Provided Image

Sarai's Road to Redemption Project

Sarai did an excellent job of removing the tatoos from Lil' Wayne's face as well as replacing his "grill" with a full set of pearly whites. She even began removing the other visible tattoos from his chest and arms!...which wasn't even part of the assignment, so way to go up and beyond in demonstrating your Photoshop skills Sarai!

Chris, given the insane amount of work to cover during our class period, has done a great job covering the material and the students, with all of their hard work, really got to create some great projects!