10/24/09 Photoshop Day 4

Class started off a little after 12:15 with the day's Learn@UW quiz.

Chris pulled up a powerpoint and explained that they were going to cartoonize (vectorize) images today.

He pulled up many examples of works he has done in the past. Aliyah seemed very excited to get to work and vectorize images. She showed her enthusiasm by openly saying that Chris's work is "really cool" and she wanted to do cool stuff too.

He had the class open up the class session folder and work with him on the gorilla picture. Chris explained how to use the pen tool and thoroughly explained the fill path and stroke path functions for tracing.

The students then had time to work on vectorizing pictures on their own.

Here is Marleny's picture that she was working on.

She did a good job using the pen tool and using the fill path to accomplish the clown-esque face.

Here is Anny's progress on her picture.

She did a very good job with fill path on her hair and brought her eyes out well with make up.

Here is Diana's progress on her own picture.

She did a great job with her skin tone selection, hair tracing and overall fill path.

Class ended with the students writing blog entries and continuing to work on their pictures they've been editing.

Session IV

The students chose all of the wrong answers in the learn@UW quiz because some of those were taught in the first lesson. "That's a looong time ago," stated one of the students in the back.

As Chou started and continued his demo, Regina stated that they can't remember any of the lessons because it was so long ago. "That's why we're reviewing," responded Chou.

"She looks cross eyed.." "She got a huge forehead!" were some of the reactions to Chou's demo.

During break, A.J. "treated" (as explained by Madeline) Regina when he was describing her hairstyle. He had said that it looked like a shark! Though A.J. didn't feel like it was an insult, the students had a different opinion. It may be the new age or something like that...

A.J. continues onto Madeline, "You look like you're from 1922." This again, was a compliment, but Made and Regina and the rest of the class took it the wrong way. Although Garret and John thought it was funny, the girls didn't, "A.J. you so funny. He over there treating people."

Like all of the other critics on their projects at ITA in the past, the sophomores couldn't take criticism, but hopefully they know that A.J.'s just being A.J. =)

As the students started their Exploration unit, A.J. came back to visit the room. "Jon get off the video game. I don't even have to look at you to even know what you're doing... you know why? Because you look like this," A.J. said as he pretended to be John, with his hand out clicking an imaginary mouse, his eyes squinting and shaking as if he lacked a brain to think.

The Exploration went fairly well with little questions because the students were really into design T-shirts for the T-shirt contest.

After break, the students took the learn@UW quiz where there were 21 questions but should have been only 20... So Regina started complaining at the end of her quiz, but it eventually went back to silence.

And that makes today the only day that these students have been quiet until the end. =)

Photoshop 3rd Session

Class today started with the usual technical problems, with the projector not picking up our computer. Special thanks to Chou for fixing things up for us, hopefully next time we'll remember the fix.

The Learn@UW quiz went very smoothly today, most of the students knew the right answers when we went over it. This was especially apparent during the reviews.

When we showed them examples of what sort of things they could do with compositing (artwork, posters, album covers) the students became very excited. The associated projects really sparked their interest, as evidenced by the fact that several of them continued to work, even through their first break!

Here are some examples of what they made:


Here's Diana's HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photo of a city skyline and lights at night. She did a great job of taking the original image, a copy of it with a high exposure, and a copy of it with a low exposure and merging them all to HDR in Photoshop.

Before

After

Here's David's "Granpappy Mixape challenge," in which he had to crop out the image of the elderly man and place into this Photoshop template of a mixtape cover. This really shows David's knowledge of the layering system by knowing which layers to have on top/ be in front with the placement of Mr. 'Pappy.




Here's Carrie's "Smileyevil" project. She did a great job of cropping out the images as well as blending the smiley face with the flaming background. The little halo was a great little compositional and artistic touch as well.




After giving them a while to work on these projects, we did a quick review game, Jeopardy-style. The back-and-forth was pretty entertaining, what with the competitive nature of the whole thing, and it ended up a pretty close score. The "Keyboard Shortcuts" section stumped a lot of them, but that's something that comes with experience, and with learning the tools that fit your style best.

Next, they took their permit test. Some of them finished rather quickly, so it's probably a safe bet that they did fairly well. Here's hoping! After that, they blogged, and we're all looking forward to reading what they wrote.

Session III

CANDY was in the agenda today and although the kids were excited, they were all engrossed in their own activities...

When the class settled down, Cristina handed out the candy and explained the instructions about... 3 times. After the third time, which (unfortunately) had to be really firm and assertive, the students understood what they were to do for the Free Draw.


Amazingly enough, many of the pictures were starting to look like a lined Jackson Pollock painting.

As Chou started his line drawing lesson, Regina announced that she is afraid of turtles (which was what Chou was coloring).. and worms.. and "every other moving animal besides a human" [stated Jonathan].

When the Exploration part of the day started, Ninah and Alli jumped to choosing the Pillsbury Dough-boy as their lined image. In addition, their group moved quite rapidly compared to the other two groups. Group 3 chose a smiley face (like the old Wal*Mart one) while group 1 struggled to find a nice set of lip outline. When group 1 discovered the outline that they wanted, Michelle had Illustrator problems (it ran into a problem and closed on her, making her lose her picture for the group).

The students eventually began to finish their projects and learned how to save in .ai and .jpg! Unfortunately, some of the students did not succeed in saving it as BOTH (probably due to the lack of listening).

During the whole session today, Jamarra kept on kicking the power plug on her computer (without realizing it) and complained about how the computer was not cooperating. After her fourth time, she decided that she'll just stop kicking altogether. However, then her chair began to mess with her (she almost fell off -- Poor Jamarra!).

After Chou explained the BTW to the students, they went off to decide what to make a layout out of.