Its a simple idea…..using photopea.com to look at colour and tone

Getting children to understand a bit about how areas of tone and colour can work to create form is a central task for most of those working in art education. The pupils generally get the idea of how line has a part to play rather quicker than these other two might combine to occupy the areas between the drawn line.

Also increasingly central to activities, at least in my art room, is how digital tools can also have a part to play and can be combined with more traditional approaches.

The following short assignment played very much into these areas, focusing on how form can be created using surfaces of colour, colour mixing and becoming familiar with how a few digitally editing tools can be used.  Those tools can be found in most editing software, and we were using the excellent (and free!) open source software offered on the photopea.com website.

The contextual background for the project that I did with my class of 12-13 year olds was transcriptions in art.  We had looked at a variety of artists’ work, but had paid particular attention to Velazquez Las Meninas and Picasso’s numerous interpretations of it.

Our focus was subsequently on the work of Vermeer for our own remakes.  The working process was reasonably simple and worked as follows:

• Import the image that you want to remake into Photopea.com
• Create a new layer above the image
• Look carefully at the image and try to identify areas of colour that whilst not being identical are at least very similar
• Use a selection lasso to trace round the area
• Sample the ‘average’ colour in the selected area and fill the whole area with just that colour
• Then proceed onto the next area

The pupils find this quite fascinating to do and work in an increasingly focused way, gradually building up their own image.  The result look a little like vector drawings that might have been created using a inbuilt filter, but it is very much a question of look, analyse and then carry out the digital steps.

For a group of 12-13 year olds the results have been excellent and has resulted in a feeling of considerable pride in the group.

The second phase was to use carbon paper to transfer the ‘vector’ drawing structure onto paper and then to paint or colour (using coloured pencils) the resulting simplified linear drawing.  At this point it becomes very much a colour mixing exercise where the subtleties of the digital image are transferred into a handmade version.

This part of the project is still at a relatively early stage, but the signs are good for some well made results.  But of course the real proof of the pudding will be in seeing whether pupils are able to take the lessons learning into future work, but hopefully without the digital step always having to be used.

Below is a link to a short PDF booklet that explains how the part of the project done using photopea.com works. It is written about portraits, but the principle and process is the same.

photopea-portraitsDownload

More playing and language integrated learning (PLIL/CLIL)

A couple of blog posts ago I coined the acronym PLIL, a variation on CLIL.  I make use of CLIL (content and language integrated learning) in much of my teaching, where I lead my art lessons with classes of Dutch children in English.  They receive the art and the second language content simultaneously and in doing so pick up the language acquisition at a hugely increased pace.

PLIL is similar, but the content is simply replaced by play.  There are plenty of situations in education where you are not directly involved in content from one of the subjects that you may be teaching in a school context.  Play, and simply messing about with the children can equally be twisted and turned to increase the language learning opportunities.

Simple word games that I dip into at the end of a lesson fit into this area.  For example, you pick a theme, ‘animals’ for example.  The first child says the name of an animal, ‘tiger’ for instance.  The second child has to pick another animal that begins with the last letter of the previous animal, so maybe ‘rhinoceros’. Then we get ‘snake’, ‘elephant’ and ‘tarantula’.  You’re not allowed to repeat an animal, and you are not allowed to hesitate/think for more than a few seconds otherwise you are forced out of the game.  It’s play, fun and laughter in the last few minutes of the lesson.

Fridge poetry tiles

I have more of these sorts of activities that I draw on from time to time.  Sometimes though, unusual situations throw up new possibilities. A case that illustrates this was a couple of months ago when five colleagues and I took ninety twelve-year-olds on a four day excursion to the coast.

The days were filled with all sorts of activities. Games, walks, playing on the beach, eating together, sports and so on.  I’ve been on such trips often enough and know that on occasions you want to offer small rewards for winning, participating well, being especially helpful, maintaining a tidy room or even complimenting a teacher on how young they look!  (That last one didn’t ever happen until we started playing this game!).

The idea grew out of the fridge poetry sets that you can buy, where you have an assortment of words stuck on your refrigerator door that you can rearrange from time to time to create poems.  I wondered if we, as teachers, could have a pile of printed out words in our pockets and bags that we could hand out when a reward was needed?  Would the pupils want to collect them to be able to play the word game that we would announce at the end of the week?  It was an experiment, but it worked exactly as we hoped. These random words on little pieces of blue paper became ‘collectors’ items’ and were rapidly hidden away when handed out.

The pupils were sleeping in rooms of four or six generally and we instructed them to pool their words and together to puzzle out the most imaginative, poetic, surreal or simply strange sentence or sentences that they could form from their words.  And surreal they were, as they stretched sentence constructions and grammatical knowledge to squeeze out the best possibilities.

Below are a couple of the ones we liked the most (Maasland, is the name of our school!)

The idea was simple. It served several purposes, but most of all, it offered the chance to have fun and be creative with language.  We’ll be repeating the idea.  Maybe our basic collection of words needs to be fined tuned a little here and there. The little linking words, the likes of or, and, then and is are perhaps less fun to ‘win’ than a fought or swallowed, but in the end every bit as important for making a sentence that hangs together well.