A student showcases the art he made out of Minecraft blocks. He dilated a drawing he made on DrawCast of the circulatory system and made a 3D model of it out of blocks
This helped as a precursor for knowledge and experience with the Minecraft app. The Minecraft project was a Flipped Class was experiment where my students ran the class as the experts and I was the facilitor of the project.
See some of the pictures and videos for student led demos and how to get Minecraft into your classroom
Prior to the students utilizing Minecraft to make art, they made a painting utilizing Drawcast. The goal was that the students would make a drawing on a grid within Drawcast, and then dilate that image into blocks utilizing Minecraft.
My 2nd block 7th graders created works based off of anatomy systems, which they were studying in Science. My other 7th graders along with all other students created works of art based on something that was important to them in their house View the other 7th grade works of art in their Edmodo folder of 7th grade Drawcast artView the 6th grade works of Drawcast art in their Edmodo folder
Drawcast art in 8th gradeAfter all of the students created their Drawcast art, they then experimented with Minecraft as part of the Flipped class session where the students ran the show
Heavy Metal (film review) is a cult classic combining animation, music and adult themed humor. Check out my review on Yahoo! Voices
Don't forget my previous 80's animation posts on Dragon's Lair & Pink Floyd's The Wall
You can check out my previous blog post on how I was able to create my grid drawing in Drawcast and the work that my students did through Drawcast as they created their own grid drawings.
By initially painting my background with the paint bucket tool, it made this part much easier. One grid square on Drawcast was recreated with four Minecraft blocks. You are also limited in which blocks to use based on color
I had to realize that the Minecraft art wouldn't look exactly like the drawing, but more like an interpretation into a new form of art. The challenge was fun to use what color blocks that I was limited by, and by building layers upon layers, I tried to make Captain as 3D as possible.
SO my background was the flag, the base layer. The body of Captain America was the midground and his shield was the foreground. If I were to turn this around at various angles, you can see that I was even trying to get the arm to go out further than the boyd by building up the blocks.
You can see the Student Gallery of InstaPicFrame art where the students compared/contrasted their Minecraft to Drawcast art in another Posterous post
Before I started up my Drawcast / Minecraft project, I wanted to see how it would look like when I made. I had some time to kill, so I wanted to dedicate some time to drawing.
I am not sure who the original artist for this Captain America picture, but I really liked the stance and how the shield is shaped. I got it off of this Variety page prior to the film coming out
I have used the Drawcast app before, I made a previous post where I used it's layer functions for Atmospheric Perspective. Now I wanted to utilize it by including a 1" grid as the background and then create a gesture drawing on top of it
After I feel a gesture drawing out, I fill it in to showcase the contour lines and the musculature of the work. Basically, I had to look at the original image on my iPhone while I drew it on my iPad
By collaborating with the 8th grade ELA teachers, my students go to take the memoir that they were working on in their ELA class and turn it into a painting
One of the first things that we did was study compostion, such as Masaccio's Holy Trinity. The goal was for the students to come up with three rought sketches of a memori that would get the viewer's eye all aroudn their work. The students used the info sheets from the English teachers to help plot out their favorite memories.The students then received a palette, palette knife and acrylic paint as they began to work with color. I encouraged them to only use the primary colors, just so that they could see what values and hues that they could make.
Over the course of a few days, they began to wrap up their canvas boards with their paintings. Some of them even had a bit of free time to make up a "free draw" painting so that they could use up their paint
