tutorial: Jasper James

Jasper James's city silhouettes are stunning! Amazingly, he creates his incredible series of images by just using light and glass to reflect focal points and cityscape backgrounds within his carefully composed silhouettes. James's travels through China (he is based in Beijing) to capture his unusual perspectives and birds eye viewpoints. For those of you who are regular readers of our blog you will be aware that our current photo project for the BTEC Nationals is related around the theme of 'journeys' so when we came across James's work we just knew we had to make a tutorial. We love how the viewer gets a real insight into the journey behind the subject and the city, creating a familiar story we can all relate to! This tutorial will show you a similar method to our recent double/multiple exposure tutorial and get you to build on existing Photoshop knowledge. 

If you haven't got Photoshop don't worry - why not create a paper city background and get your students to practice compositional skills by posing in front of it. Your class will love it and you'll get a piece of art up on your wall ready to use for that perfect shoot again. We'd love to see any examples you do so as always drop us a shout if you do use our tutorial.

- Kirsty ❤

Vasilisa Forbes tutorial

At i heart teaching art we can't get enough of geometric shapes and colour at the moment! You may of been following our posts recently about our BTEC National photography students - this tutorial concludes the digital part of our lessons and gets students to practice everything they have learnt so far: masking and cropping in Photoshop! I was new to Vasilisa Forbes work until last week and I am so glad I have introduced the bright coloured collages to my students. They loved the use of 'found' imagery and how the artist has used shapes that intersect together to hide the subject matter and create a narrative story line within the image. Have a go at our tutorial below and let us know which work your class preferred: Julie Cockburn or Vasilisa Forbes!

- Kirsty ❤

digital: digital tools we love part IV

When it comes to the start of a new project I'm always keen to show my students as much visual information as I can - I want them to see the artists/designers that have inspired me to create the project in the first place and I want them to get inspired too! The thing is, when I first started teaching the only way I'd ever seen this done was using a PowerPoint presentation or endless print outs and it didn't seem to quite cut it. PowerPoints always make me feel like I'm meant to explain and discuss every image and print outs seem like a crazy use of paper, I wanted something fresh and engaging that allowed my students to just get a quick flavour of the project that drew them in so they got excited about it without me giving them my opinion of why it's a great project and how the project ought to take shape. Then it came to me - a video! Above is the first ever 'video intro' I created for my students, the class I showed it too responded really well - they loved it having a bit of music, it meant they got their own bit of time to digest the project and it made a great starter at the beginning of the lesson! We create our videos using iMovie as you can quickly drop still images, add text and captions and then drop some music into it - it's really simple, in fact I found it's quicker than creating a PowerPoint (or the like!) and has captured my students attention a lot more effectively. 'Video intro' is my favourite way to start a project and I've got a bunch lined up for September, as have the rest of the team check out this amazing one that Kirsty put up today for her photography project! It's brilliant! 

- Claire ❤

Like this digital tools we love post? Why not check out parts one, two and three as well! 

tutorial: Si Scott inspired typography

Si Scott is a brilliant Graphic Designer whose clean cut style and beautiful, swirly, typography makes him a must look at designer when we deliver a typography project. This term will be no exception - we're mixing our typography project a bit this year and going for a t-shirt outcome, something which Si Scott has also dabbled in. The tutorial below will take you through how to use the warp and twirl tool in illustrator to create your own Si Scott inspired typography! This lesson is always a hit with our students - we mix it up so they spend half the session on the digital type and half a session getting messy and having a go creating type by hand with inks and fine liners! 

- Claire ❤

tutorial: how to create an animated gif

As promised when we posted about Matthew Divito's incredible animated gifs, here's a tutorial which takes you through how to create an animated gif in Photoshop using photographs. Before you get started you'll need to take a series of photographs, for my example I used the continuous shooting mode on my camera but if you haven't got this you could take a more photo shoot approach and move objects/people between shots - that's what our students did when they had a go at this last year. Animated gif's are really fun and quick so it's easy to teach the students how to do it in one lesson, then get them to focus on developing a concept and thinking about composition to develop it further and create some more advanced outcomes. 

So that's it it's really simple and awesome! Also if you are using it for a lesson why not get your students to watch the documentary 'Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium' by PBS off-book as a starter! It's great as it tells you all about the history of animated gifs and shows a range of different examples of animated gifs and how they've evolved over the years! The Photographers Gallery also have some wonderful resources, examples and artists relating to animated gifs as part of their exhibition 'Born in 1987: The animated GIF' which you can access, here. 

- Claire ❤

Tutorial: How to create a solarised photograph in Photoshop

Example of a digital solarised print

The best part of being on holiday is getting the time to learn new techniques to teach my students. Solarisation is a method that has always interested me and you never know what your getting as you expose your print for that brief second in the dark. For those of you who are unaware of what solarisation is... it is a photographic effect that gives the print the appearance of being both negative and positive at the same time. In the darkroom it is achieved by subjecting the print to a brief second exposure during the development stage. The lightest tones of the print are affected the most by the second exposure thus altering the normal tonal values of the print. A white line or halo will appear between the first and second exposure creating a 'solarised' print.

In this video tutorial I will be showing you how to create a similar result digitally in Adobe Photoshop without the mess and unpredictability of the darkroom. If you like this tutorial then why not make the effect into a lesson and have a battle with darkroom vs digital solarisation methods. You could even look at the sabattier work of Man Ray to inspire your students outcomes. Let us know which one wins and have fun solarising!

- Kirsty ❤

Lesson Idea: creating colour palettes

Colour is something which important in all of the art and design pathways, so I like to spend a lesson within each project creating colour palettes. My tutorial uses Illustrator so if you've got it I recommend getting your students to create palettes this way - if not you could use a colour palette generator or browse the great pre-made palettes Wear Palettes, colour mankind, Kuler and ColourLovers. I think it's really important to spend a session focusing on colour as it allows the students a bit of time to really consider how their primary research can influence their final outcome. 

quick note: I tend to place the lesson just after initial ideas as by this stage students should have a good breadth of primary/secondary imagery already in their sketchbooks - it can also be a good idea to set a homework task the lesson before asking them to take 10-20 images of 'colour' relevant to their intended outcome. 

Starter: What is a colour palette? (5-15 mins)

Not all students will be familiar with what a colour palette is so it's good to start with a few visuals. I usually use examples from wear palettes or colour mankind as that's what we're aiming to end up with by the end of the session! You'll know your class best so you can open up a bit of a discussion around colour and colour inspiration here if you like! Once you've shown some examples a great activity is to get students to work in pairs with an image* and some paint swatches (you can pick these up for free from places like B&Q and Homebase, we always like to keep a stash in our cupboards!) and get them to create a handmade colour palette for the image with a limit of 4 colours.

* I like to use images from still life set ups we've worked from earlier in the project if possible! If not I find images online or in magazines  

Main: Creating the colour palette!

Before you get stuck in creating the palette your students will need to gather their imagery. I get students to select 3-5 images from their sketchbook or online focusing more on the colour than the content of the image.  They should make sure in this time that images are scanned/ready to go on the computer. Once the imagery is ready they can get started creating their palettes using the tutorial below... 

Plenary: Print and Review

Get students to work in the pair they were in at the start of the lesson and review the colour palettes they've made. They should do this by presenting the colour palette they like best and justifying how it relates to their project - their partner should question this and make suggestions for improvements and give opinion on how successful they feel the colour selection is in relation to the theme of the project. Notes for the feedback could be made straight onto the print out and put into sketchbooks afterwards! 

Extension:

Extension tasks will vary depending on what sort of project or what course you are delivering this lesson on. I've used it in Fine Art, Textile and Graphics lessons so here's a few of my suggestions for those courses, although I'm sure there's tons more things you could try! Fine Art, experiment in chosen medium, e.g paint, and attempt mix and colour match the colours, then work on to photocopies of preliminary sketches using the colours or print a sheet of each of the colours from palette and collage onto a preliminary sketch. Textiles, aim to source fabric/thread/bead/yarn swatches to recreate colour palette in textile form. Graphics, use the colour palette created in illustrator to re-colour a piece of digital work or work up design ideas/sketches further using the colour palette created. 

So that's my ideas for a colour palette lesson! As always if you use any of our ideas in your lessons we'd love to hear how you got on or see examples of your students work!

- Claire ❤

Tutorial: How to make a Chris Ede inspired illustration

Chris Ede (Image courtesy of illustrationweb)    

                                      

Following on from my 3W about Chris Ede comes this tutorial which aims to give you an insight into some basic Adobe Photoshop techniques to teach students how to create a simple Chris Ede inspired illustration. I used this tutorial with my Btec National Art & Design students for a project on animal illustration and they loved it! The outcomes were very impressive, some even put my little chicken example to shame! The tutorial shows my own interpretation of how you might create these types of effects and they are by no means the actual techniques used by the artist but meant as a simpler less advanced version for beginner to intermediate level learners.

Hope you enjoy!

- Jess ❤

Tutorial: Letterpress effects in Photoshop

At I Heart Teaching Art we believe that art needs to be interactive no matter what course subject be it fine art, graphics or photography. We love getting students to create work that you just want to touch and this tutorial is going to teach you how to create beautiful typographic letterpress effects. You may of seen Claire's embossing tutorial a few weeks ago (if not go check it out!) - this is a great addition that compliments her lesson activities really well.

So, you may be thinking what could I use this technique for? Well, it could be a great part of a typographic lesson. As a starter activity students could test different approaches of 'hand' letter pressing before moving on to create the same effect digitally. We're fortunate enough to have some some lovely metal letterpress stamps in our department and they look great stamped into thick, watercolour paper. If you don't have then don't worry just make some letterforms out of thin aluminium wire, wet some paper and hammer the letters in one by one. You'll get some great effects! Students can then follow 

our digital letterpress tutorial above and compare the differences in a group critique at the end of the lesson. This effect could also be a good alternative to our textile inspired album cover tutorial or even swing tag packaging. Have fun and if you use this effect in class then please share the results - we'd love to see them!

♥ resources:

vintage envelope: Fuzzimo

brushes: We Function

font: Marmellata Jam

Tutorial: How to use the Blend Tool in Adobe Illustrator Part 3

This is the last of my tutorials on how to use the blend tool in Adobe Illustrator and hopefully this will round off the set nicely and give you a small insight into how you might go about using the technique to create a beautiful piece of digital abstract art like those by Andy Gilmore. The tutorial is intended to show a direct replica of one of Gilmore's works for educational purposes so please experiment with the techniques to come up with your own design! Also, this is my interpretation of how you might create this effect and it is by no means the actual technique used by the artist. 

Magical Geometric Digital Art by Andy Gilmore

Part 3: How to use the Blend Tool in Illustrator to create an Andy Gilmore digital artwork.

Then why not head over to Veerle's Blog and have a go at her tutorial on how to create Andy Gilmore style multi-coloured spirograph (below) learning how to use the rotate tool in the process!

Happy tutorial-ing!

- Jess ❤

digital: digital tools we love, part I

what we use in our department: flickr, pinterest, you tube and blogger

I'm a huge fan of digital 'tools' as I find they tend to be things which make my life easier and as a wonderful addition, make my students learning experience more exciting. Over the next few weeks my posts are all going to be 100% focused on digital, I'm going to discuss the stuff that has revolutionised my (teaching) life to give an insight into what I (and colleagues!) do and how it works and also to show how easily you can start using these things yourself! So to kick start the digital focus I'm going to run through the easy to access stuff that you can whizz over and check out. 

Our departments journey into the digital world began with blogging. I turned up eager, excited, new to teaching and a long term blogger and thought hey! let's do this! It was received initially with a kind of hesistance but has thankfully evolved into a key part of our department used by staff and students alike. In a moment which I can only retrospectively describe as sheer craziness I created separate course blogs for each course (we had 6 at one point!) upon realising that was a bit nuts, I merged all 6 into one combined blog: Coulsdon Visual Arts. We use it to post about student work and exhibitions and artists our students may find inspiring - it's essentially a quick and visual way to share resources that allows our students to start becoming more independent with their learning. For example, it's really great being able to direct students to our own archives of artists, textile/fashion designers, graphic designers and photographers to kick start research for new projects. It also allows us to advertise the awesome stuff we've got going on to the world and/or potential new students, in fact I'm sure I could bore you senseless with all the things I think it's great for but those are the big players! 

Blogging sort of opens you up to getting involved with all the other social media stuff that's out there. A lot of the stuff we get involved with often happens because one of us is already using it for our own work or because we're pretty geeky when it comes to the net so we've read up on someone else using it and thought it sounded awesome.   The other key things we use are flickr, Pinterest and  you tube. Each tool plays a different role,  Flickr  for example we use simply because it allows us to share photos easily! We find it's one of the best ways to share our images with our own students as they can access it both at college and at home. You Tube on the other hand allows us to upload video tutorials - something which I'll post more about over the next few weeks. Finally, Pinterest, I've already posted about pinterest actually, but I cannot stress enough how incredible it's been, you literally would not believe the amount of annotated research work that has come out of some of my AS Graphics students since we introduced it, it's incredible! Also I'm just so much more into visual planning as a starting point, this summer I've started each of my schemes of work for next year with a pinterest board -  it's great because I can share it with colleagues and once I start the projects I can direct my students straight to the board so they can get a quick visual overview of the project. 

Phew! Well I hope that's given you a bit of an overview and a few things to go and explore. So what else? Well coming up over the next few weeks I'll be getting into a bit more of the nitty, gritty stuff:

• Blogging: How to create your own, lesson blogs, student blogs and more!
• Video: tutorials, how to's, recorded assessment, etc. 
• Gadgets/software aka things that make my teaching life simpler 

and more! 

- Claire ❤

Tutorial: Ghosting an image in Photoshop

As I've been planning for my new distortion project I thought to myself there must be an easy way to digitally manipulate a photo to give it a warped appearance and after much playing around on Photoshop... here it is! This tutorial is a really quick, fun and simple technique to create distorted 'ghostly' images and I think students will love it. It helps if you start of with the right type of portrait so for mine I chose in honour of Claire, Gwen Stefani (if you haven't noticed by now she's a bit of a no doubt fan!) Images that work best are going to be those that look shocked or scared so get your students to practice in class by posing with props and using lighting to really dramatise their image. Once you're happy, download the images onto a computer and follow the video tutorial below.

You could easily combine this technique into a whole lesson looking at movement. Start of with this digital technique and then take your students into the darkroom to experiment with movement of photographic paper. You can distort the image or give the illusion of movement by twisting, bending or dragging photographic paper on the enlarger baseboard. This technique works with photograms or negative prints and all you have to do is play around with the varying length of exposure. Like the sound of this? Then have a look at my BTEC L2 Photography Pinterest board for some inspiration.

PS. This is my first time at creating a video tutorial so I hope it's easy to follow. Enjoy!

- Kirsty ❤

Tutorial: How to use the blend tool to make cool text and imagery

Flower - Jessica Townsend     Slinky Type Paul Hollingworth

As promised (albeit a little late) here are my tutorials on how to make this charming spirograph style flower image and some other really cool things such as the 'Slinky Type' above by Paul Hollingworth.

I stumbled across the 'blend tool' in Adobe Illustrator by chance whilst having a play around one day and it is one of the coolest and simplest functions of the program guaranteed to give you that 'wow' moment and bring you and your students hours of fun! There are lots of great things you can do with this tool so I will be introducing the basics today and then bringing you more advanced techniques in my next tutorial post.

Part 1. Blend tool introduction and how to create simple 'slinky text'

Part 2. Creating simple spirography style imagery using the blend tool

Hope you enjoyed these little tutorials! Don't forget to watch out for Part 3 (coming soon) to see how to make more advanced imagery inspired by one of my all time hero's Andy Gilmore (below).

Magical Geometric Digital Art by Andy Gilmore

- Jess ❤

networking

We're slowly making progress with the i heart teaching art project and today we sorted out our twitter and facebook pages so do follow or like us if you do in fact like us! We're also on You Tube and we'll be posting video tutorials and more over the next few months so watch this space, it's all starting to come together! You can find our different pages by clicking on the buttons above! We're also on pinterest!

note: these beautiful sketchy icons are by Chris on spoon graphics -  you can find out more about them, here.