Readying for our annual Renaissance #Photoshop project

I had a great planning meeting with Katelin O’Hare (maternity leave replacement for Eleana Pellegrino) about our upcoming Renaissance Photoshop project. We are going to use a couple of specific images from particular websites to introduce a discussion of “image manipulation throughout the ages.”

Essentially, every image/portrait/painting/photograph is manipulated to some extent, as in the portrait of Abraham Lincoln (below) pairing his head with John Calhoun’s body:

Even one of the earliest daguerreotypes is of a busy urban street scene rendered almost sleepy-looking since the long exposure cancelled the pedestrian and carriage traffic save for the lone shoe-shine guy in the bottom left:

I love these composites of historical scenes blended with modern photos:

(Taken from http://www.petapixel.com/2013/04/02/photos-of-modern-day-locations-blended-with-shots-of-major-historical-events)

I also want to share the 1982 scandal of National Geographic moving the pyramids to fit in the vertical frame of their cover:

and this composite from the LA Times:

Self portraits: Mixedmedia meets multimedia in 6th grade Art #artsed

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.