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!