Eleana Pellegrino (Art Teacher at The School at Columbia University) worked with her 6th graders to create self portraits using pencil, ink, and watercolor. Students at our K-8 create self-portraits every year, and it’s illuminating to recognize how they see themselves and how that changes annually. The 6th grade self-portrait integrates nicely with their overarching theme: How History Shapes My Identity. Eleana took photos of each portrait and created an album of images on The Gallery (our internal photo server powered by Drupal).
Later, I showed the students how to grab this digital image of their painted self-portrait and open it up on Photoshop. We did the following steps:
1. Adjust the image size to 8″x10″
2. Add layers for each Text item
3. Experiment with Text size, color, font, warping, orientation, and Free Transform to rotate or skew text boxes
4. Export finished image as a jpeg
5. Upload their jpeg file to another shared album on The Gallery
The bulletin board with printouts of their finished art looks pretty spectacular in the stairwell.
