Students in Ms. Makol’s Art 1 and Studio Art classes focused on digital art 3rd quarter, using iPads to capture digital photographs, using Weebly to create websites that showcase their work, and learning photo manipulation in Photoshop. To effectively create digital art, students learned both formal and technical skills; for example, they used formal compositional tools such as the rule of thirds and emphasis to create images that are visually appealing. Students also learned many useful skills in Photoshop, allowing them to combine various images together to create new meaning.
It was very important to maintain an effective workflow with our digital projects. Workflow is, in this context, the steps and processes required to create something from start to finish. For example, a restaurant has to maintain an effective workflow from the time a customer makes an order, to when it arrives to the table. There are various steps from start to finish that are important to producing a high-quality product within a specific timeframe. As primary step to help create an effective digital workflow, students learned how to organize and name files, and then learned when to use various file types.
To combine these skills that they learned, students created a summative project that was an animated GIF about a social issue of their choice. GIFs have been popular on the internet as a way to create simple animations, and more recently have been used to communicate information and opinions through memes. Students cut out various images to create layers in Photoshop, and animated them in a frame-by-frame animation. Freshmen students Karina S. and Devion N. created GIFs with encouraging messages, saying “Stay Positive” and “If you fall, you better get up.” Other students, such as junior, Ashley S., created a rainbow-colored GIF about the current issue of marriage equality. GIFs are made for the internet, so students posted their final animated GIFs on their Weebly websites. Check out some of the animated GIFs below!