Computer Abstractions

Post date: May 22, 2014 1:11:11 PM

So, this was interesting, I have started to introduce choice ahead of next year. This was one of the projects I gave students a choice between. They were surprisingly more favorable to the psychedelic portrait than they were the letter painting. which is odd given how much they complained about having to draw portraits. And since my projector bulb burnt out, they haven't been able to use the opaque projector to transfer their images so a lot of them have made surprisingly adept applications of the grid. I still have to help them adjust the math which is troublesome, I'd like them to have that handled at some point, but oh well, it's close enough if some of them are using it for their own ends.

The goal of this project is to introduce students to Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop in hopes that they'll use them creatively to supplement their fine art practice or consider taking Comp./Vid. I try to get them to let go of the reference and making things look exactly like the portrait, they're supposed to have fun with it and loosely reference their subject. It's fun to see the various solutions they come up with, and most of them just don't like the frustration of dealing with computers. It's kinda scary to see how little they know about computers, and how they don't quite want to stick to instructions. Granted my tutorials aren't perfect, but it's sometimes something as easy as just reading ahead or playing around, and the problem is fixed.

Here's a link to the presentation, and below are just a handful of some of the good examples. If you want the tutorials for the references used in the projects they're in this unit folder. The example below top right shows the reference that's been Photoshopped and the resulting drawing.