Greek Column art by printing from meat trays

A modified lesson plan that was shown to me from Dick Blick allows students to carve into styrofoam meat trays and print with them

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 The first thing that the students did was study the three styles of Greek columns: Doric, Ionic & Corinthian.The students came up with two sketches a piece, picked their best one and drew that on a piece of paper. The drawings were then taped down to a styrofroam meat tray and were redrawn to press the image into the styrofoam.

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The students then studied prints, reliefs and carving techniques. I urged them that they were basically creating  a rubber stamp. Whatever they wanted to print, they need to carve out everything around it using an X-acto knife.

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 Once the carving was done, the students used a palette knife to scoop out block printing ink or acrylic paint onto the stytrofoam. The brayer rolled the ink/paint around to level out the medium and cover over the styrofoam.

The students would then press the styrofoam onto a piece of paper and print the image as many times as possible until their print ran dry.

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 Once their prints were dry, they cut them out and arranged them on a 18x24 piece of black paper. My fellow art teacher recommended them utilizing some of the old text books. so the students ripped up pages from books to create a background for the prints.

Once their background was filled, the students then glued these prints down and arrange them in an eye catching composition.

 

 

Why do I like Minecraft - a student reflection

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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

Student grid paintings done in Drawcast

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.

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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

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View the other 7th grade works of art in their Edmodo folder of 7th grade Drawcast art

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View the 6th grade works of Drawcast art in their Edmodo folder

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Drawcast art in 8th grade

After 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

 

How did Heavy Metal (film) impact animation in the 80's

Another in a series of articles that I have been doing about 80's animation.

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

How to create a dilated image through Minecraft

  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.

 After the students create their drawing, they are to create a background out of Minecraft blocks. They dilate the grid into a 1:4 scale. So the Drawcast grid was 8 x 7 blocks, so the students recreated their wall out of Minecraft blocks to be 16 x 14. 

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

 In the past, I have done various Grid Drawing Projects with my students. One of things that I encourage with them that if any one block is too difficult to draw, sub divide that into quarters. Again, since each Drawcast square equalled four Minecraft blocks (1:4 scale) I merged all of the Drawcast layers into one, and then started to draw a plus symbol on each Drawcast square to sub divide it.

 I was able to utilize the Multigesture Function of the iPad by swiping inbetween the Drawcast and Minecraft app. By the way, there are two Minecraft Pocket Edition apps. The main difference is that the free edition doesn't allow you to save your work.

 The Multigesture Function was a bit difficult, it turned out best when I had the Minecraft image on my iPhone and built the Minecraft art on my iPad. Overall, I wasn't TOO happy with the final product, but I did finally realize how/why Minecraft was so addicting for my students.

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.

 Finally, I wanted to showcase this step-by-step process to my students. I find the best way to do it is using the free InstaPicFrame app. By using this app, you can put a variety of images together beside each other in a variety of frame templates.

You can see the Student Gallery of InstaPicFrame art where the students compared/contrasted their Minecraft to Drawcast art in another Posterous post

 Finally, this is the original grid template that I made which is basically a 1"x1" grid that I downloaded the PDF from a Math site and converted it into a JPG with GIMP. If I were to do it again, I would download a .5" or even .25" grid, as it seems the more Minecraft blocks you have to create the art, the easier it is to duplicate.

How to use Drawcast for a grid painting

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

 A great function with the Drawcast app is not so much drawing on the layers, but combining them and adjusting the Intensity/Translucence so that you can see other works, but not others. In this case, I combined layers to move them around

 And I then colored in the individual blocks using the paint bucket tool to make my background. If I were to do it all over again, I would use this tool more to help give me that blocky feel that I am going to make in Minecraft next. 

 By tinkering around with the layers some more, I got the transparency and arrangement of them just right. I knew that my students would be okay to take up their part of the project, so check out the gallery of Student Drawcast Grid Paintings