Bryn Celynnog - Year 9

The art classes in this school had used very little ICT in their lessons so it felt natural with my degree background to run a Photoshop project with my year 9 class. Year's 9 and 10's scheme of work was 'Aboriginal', therefore I came up with a project that would see learners designing a cultural poster as if it was going to be shown in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Photoshop. This was definitely my toughest project as it was hard enough at times to get the learners logging onto the computer successfully, let alone using Photoshop.

First of all, learners were asked to pick two cultural mask drawings they had done in their skecthbooks and combine the two to make a new mask. Learners then fine lined these drawings and handed them into me, so I could then scan them in and have them ready for the learners the week after so they could begin work in Photoshop.

 

Here are a few of the initial line drawings done. These were then scanned in so learners could then go into Photoshop, play around with levels to make the lines darker, and then begin to colour them in. For each week I prepared a handout with the step by step tasks on it for that lesson, this was designed to help any learners who were falling behind or for anyone who wished to progress on without the rest of the class.

 

 

 

 

 

Once learners had repositioned their marks and scaled them to how they wanted them, learners coloured in their marks using block colours, and then added some tones. Once this was done learners found a cultural pattern off the Internet into the background. Here are some of the posters above that match the above line drawings.

 

These posters looked great and from learner evaluations it was fed back that they enjoyed using Photoshop. However, I felt these posters were not personal enough because the background image was just one they had found off the Internet. Also, if they made the backgrounds more personal then the learners would achieve a higher marking level.

 

This is where I brought in 'scratch art' cards. Learners were given one card, with this card they would scrape in a cultural pattern. Again I scanned in these cards so they could then be the new background in the final posters.

 

 

These are example of what some of the 'scratch art' cards looked like.

 

Learners then dragged in their patterned cards into their existing Photoshop file, they then tiled up their cards in the background.

 

 

Here are some of the final posters, they are now a lot more personal! The original line drawings stand out a lot more as well.

 

I really enjoyed this project and the outcomes were brilliant. However, it was definitely my most stressful project. Stress came from little things like finding available rooms with computers that had Photoshop on and from saving the learners work correctly into one place. Each lesson was very difficult as I was hard to keep everyone working at the same level, and you could not keep your eyes on everyone at the same time because they were all hiding behind a computer screen.

 

The whole Art department was really pleased with the outcomes of this project, so much so that this project was then fed into some year 10 and 11 classes.  

 

 

Here is the final year 9 Photoshop wall display I put up outside of the Art rooms.