By: TwitterButtons.com
By TwitterButtons.com

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

How to use Drawcast for a grid painting

Before I started up my Drawcast / Minecraft project, I wanted to see how it would look like when I made. I had some time to kill, so I wanted to dedicate some time to drawing.

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I am not sure who the original artist for this Captain America picture, but I really liked the stance and how the shield is shaped. I got it off of this Variety page prior to the film coming out

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I have used the Drawcast app before, I made a previous post where I used it's layer functions for Atmospheric Perspective. Now I wanted to utilize it by including a 1" grid as the background and then create a gesture drawing on top of it

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After I feel a gesture drawing out, I fill it in to showcase the contour lines and the musculature of the work. Basically, I had to look at the original image on my iPhone while I drew it on my iPad

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 A great function with the Drawcast app is not so much drawing on the layers, but combining them and adjusting the Intensity/Translucence so that you can see other works, but not others. In this case, I combined layers to move them around
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 And I then colored in the individual blocks using the paint bucket tool to make my background. If I were to do it all over again, I would use this tool more to help give me that blocky feel that I am going to make in Minecraft next. 
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 By tinkering around with the layers some more, I got the transparency and arrangement of them just right. I knew that my students would be okay to take up their part of the project, so check out the gallery of Student Drawcast Grid Paintings
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Saturday, October 27, 2012

Toondoo about Ancient Civilizations by 6th graders: How to use digital storytelling for interdisciplinary projects

By collaborating with the sixth grade Social Studies classes, students had some great info about ancient civilizations such as the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia and Egypt. 

They were able to view my ToonDoo Tutorials to complete it. Check them out so you can do this in your class

Jorge on the class system in Zuggerats in Mesopotamia

 

Vanessa and Selena Gomez explain Egypt

Mittens wants Egyptian Spaghetti and learns about Ancient Egypt along the way

Trinity and Katniss talk about the Indus Valley to help Katniss out on a test

Ariella gives us a tour of Ancient Egypt

Timmy talks about the Huang He

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

How do you paint a memoir

By collaborating with the 8th grade ELA teachers, my students go to take the memoir that they were working on in their ELA class and turn it into a painting

 One of the first things that we did was study compostion, such as Masaccio's Holy Trinity. The goal was for the students to come up with three rought sketches of a memori that would get the viewer's eye all aroudn their work. The students used the info sheets from the English teachers to help plot out their favorite memories.

The students then received a palette, palette knife and acrylic paint as they began to work with color. I encouraged them to only use the primary colors, just so that they could see what values and hues that they could make. 

 Over the course of a few days, they began to wrap up their canvas boards with their paintings. Some of them even had a bit of free time to make up a "free draw" painting so that they could use up their paint
It was nice to have a class set of Ipads at our disposal so that they could further discuss their memoir work. The students that finished first got to use the Pages app so that they could properly showcase their art and emotions into a written form. Check out some of them below

Clarissa.pdf Download this file
CormeekMeek.pdf Download this file
Elisabeth_Neal.pdf Download this file
Ginger_best_.pdf Download this file
Heaven2.pdf Download this file
Jacob.pdf Download this file
Krysta.pdf Download this file
Olivia.pdf Download this file
Maria.pdf Download this file
Santaliz.pdf Download this file
Tyra2.pdf Download this file
Zachary.pdf Download this file