Salon Des Enfants 2012

Every spring, Phoenix Elementary art students exhibit at the Alwun House. I was lucky enough to teach a middle school elective geared towards creating finished pieces using methods chosen by me but using whatever subject matter they wanted. One of the techniques we all did was stippling. We watched a video called "Hero" on Vimeo which showed an artist stippling a portrait. (See Animoto below)

Digital Color Theory

My color theory class not only had to learn how to mix tints, shades, secondary and intermediate colors using only primary colors, black and white, but they also had to transfer that knowledge to digital media. In the process they learned how to use Gimp layers, save to several formats, colorize using hue, saturation, and lightness sliders, and the rotation tool. (See Animoto below)

New Gimp Assignment for Digital Art Class

How2 fixurpix2

View more presentations from Noreen Strehlow

Jr. High Autobiographical Self Portraits

Students in the digital art class created layered self portraits using a photo cutout of themselves on a transparent background. Subsequent layers were a famous work of art and then four layers depicting special interests. Here are the first ones completed.

Jr. High Color Wheel Portraits using Gimp

I love doing this project so all my digital art students do it. It teaches so many digital skills and tools that by the time they are done, they can do many projects using Gimp. If they are lucky enough to have access to Photoshop in the future, they are able to make the transition without any teaching. (See Animoto below)

Andy Warhol Revisited - Jr. High Digital Graphics

7th and 8th graders in my Digital Graphics class visited the Andy Warhol Interactive website in order to explore variations in hue and saturation which were our two most recent vocabulary words. After getting a sense of what could be done using Marilyn Monroe as a subject, students learned how to resize and duplicate layers in Gimp and then explore the Hue/Saturation feature to recolorize their school pictures. A few who finished early got to do the same thing for a cartoon character. These students are learning many of the tools and features of Gimp in doing this project. (See Prezi below)

Let's Make Some Bling; a Gimp Tutorial

Although we couldn't afford Photoshop, I felt that students needed to learn digital graphic skills so I adapted a fun project using the open source program Gimp. I had done this with Ginger Baron's students at Lowell School and ACE students at Prep, so I knew it was a successful activity. By the time it was finished, kids knew a lot about graphic tools. (See video below)