Submitted by Sarah Wegenast, Aurora Middle School
Unit: Digital Imaging - Computer Graphics & Design 
Grade Level: Upper elementary through high school (Lesson could even be done "low technology" using cut paper collage) Advanced Lesson: Digital Imaging - Poster

Purpose:

The purpose of this assignment is to introduce digital manipulation using Adobe Photoshop (You can get Photoshop at the Adobe Education Store). Scanning, Crop and selection tool techniques, use of the digital camera and how to create a photomontage using the faculty as the subject to print.

Evaluation:

The assignment below will be combined with all other assignments in this unit to determine your grade.

Instructions:

You will work with a partner for this project. You will need to digitally photograph your faculty member. One with the body and one shoulder and up. We will talk more about positions during our overview discussion. Save these images as JPEG in a folder in your student graphics folder as faculty-your name. View the gallery for more sample projects.

Resources:

Barry Kite - Aberrant Art- "Barry Kite's style of social and political parody via the "re-positioning" of art historical and contemporary media imagery has won him several art competition awards and placed his work in numerous private and corporate collections." Kite combines photographic and hand-coloring techniques to create the foundation of his current work. For most of the past 25 years, Barry's work has been cut-and-paste: done by hand, no computers. Recently however, he acquired a large format digital printer and has been playing around with Photoshop--which may become a more prevalent tool in the future.

Book: Sunday Afternoon, Looking for the Car: The Aberrant Art of Barry Kite - Alan Bisbort gives us a launching pad to help understand and appreciate the amazing work of photo-collage artist extraordinaire, Barry Kite. It's quite obvious that Mr. Kite is more interested in letting the art do the talking but sometimes one needs a little help to realize that these are not just silly pictures but that they have provocative, and sometimes, truly philisophical meaning.

A.    Procedure

1.    This project will be a humorous photomontage of our faculty. You will need to sign up for a teacher/administrator you'd like to use in this project. You will need to get a permission form signed to do this and fill out the information sheet on your faculty member.

2.    This project is not to be shared with anyone outside of the class. We will surprise the faculty with a special display and letter.

3.    Choose an existing image or take one yourself that you will combine with the Faculty's image.  It needs to relate to the questions asked on the questionnaire. We will discuss this at length in our overview. Note from Judy: You might want to make this an art history lesson too.... find some master work of art to tweak in PhotoShop. See work of Barry Kite.

4.    You will need to follow the directions learned in prior lessons.

5.    Your resolution mode should be 300 dpi for print and only 72 dpi for web. For this project we are going to print it.

6.    Save and name the file by the faculty's name and your name.

7.    Do not print until you have shown me the collage on screen. Print to the laser printer for this project.

8.    You will need to create two prints. One to be mounted and turned in for a grade and display and one to give the faculty member.

For "low technology" - Students take digital photographs of faculty - then create collage from magazine images (cut and paste) - then size the faculty photograph to fit their composition.

Faculty Questions:

B.   Criteria for evaluation

• Photo Montage/Photo Manipulation/Composition/Creativity
• Art Rubric on skill/craftsmanship/originality/requirements/effort.

Submitted by Sarah Wegenast, Aurora Middle School
Unit: Digital Imaging - Computer Graphics & Design 
Lesson: Digital Imaging - Poster
Grade level: Middle school and up (Sarah did this with 9th graders)

From Sarah: This is the last project of the semester. By this time they are very well versed in Photoshop. They choose a subject of their own interest. They must use filter combinations, color saturation changes, layers, opacity, it must follow a theme and basically hit on every area we covered over the semester. A lot of this deals with size of images due to the fact that it will be printed on an 11X 17 printout. Some images will have to be scanned in and others from the Net. I really let them go at this with little or no intervention. They have the technical knowledge and the element and principle, layout, etc knowledge to complete this. It really is the final project that helps me assess their working knowledge and technical know how.