Art +Technology: A Picture Person Project

In another life I was an art teacher. For 13 years, in fact! I've never lost my love for art, so when my son started kindergarten and the PTA was looking for a parent to act as the "Art Mom" (called "Picture Person" in my son's district), I jumped at the chance.

The program in my son's district is through the Picturing America program, which, I gotta tell ya, made me a little disappointed at first. I wanted full freedom to choose my own artists and activities! But it really makes sense - by using this program, we ensure that grade levels and volunteers don't overlap or repeat.

For one of my visits, I chose the painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze. I adapted one of my favorite former 6th grade art projects to fit the kindergarten level. I took photos of the students wearing a cape, tri-corner hat, and holding a play sword, and superimposed them into the painting!

If you do some Googley-searching you can find links back to my old art blog, including this entry that talks a little about our Kehinde Wiley project. (Ugh thanks to Photobucket - that's sarcastic, by the way - most of my old blog images are now broken links.) Kehinde Wiley poses his models in classical poses after Baroque-style portraiture. We used this as inspiration when posing for our George Washington photos.

While the photos were being taken, students worked at their tables. They used colored pencil to add patterned backgrounds to a black and white photocopy of the original painting, to mimic the highly ornate backgrounds in a Wiley painting:

image via

At home, I worked to layer the original painting with the student photos we had just taken. I did a presentation at a PTA workshop for the other volunteers that details the whole process below:

This "picture person" project was really fun because it allowed me to combine my love of art and technology into one fun project. I sent color printouts of the final images home, along with a quick note explaining what we did in class. I got a lot of positive feedback from the parents and the students seemed to really enjoy dressing up and being a part of the artwork!

- Mrs L.

Using Pixlr to Combine Images in Creative Ways

I love using Pixlr to combine pictures to make silly photographs! My students do several projects using Pixlr editor that require removing the background on a photo and combining it with another. Removing backgrounds and combining images are pretty simple starter tasks for learning how to manipulate digital images. Here is a breakdown of how we have used Pixlr in class.

Me on a Wheaties Box (left), and Mr Gail-nimals (right)

Visual Puns (left), and Animal Mash-Ups Alliteration Poem (right)

Past projects have included putting ourselves on a Wheaties box, creating animal mash-ups and writing alliteration peoms to accompany them, and visual puns. Just for fun (we had a couple of extra days one term!), we put our assistant principal's head on a variety of animals and called them "Mr. Gail-nimals."

What's great about these projects is that it gets students comfortable with the idea of layers and how to manipulate them, as well as file type limitations (like how a .jpg cannot have a transparent background!) and sizing/re-sizing of images.

We use Pixlr as our image manipulation tool because it is a pretty good FREE resource that works on our Chromebook devices - it's not as user-friendly as fancy Photoshop software would be, but since we can't install software anyway, this suits us quite well. Students need to get used to using the "Free Transform" tool to re-size images and create a selection box with anchor points - they're used to just clicking on an object in Photoshop - but most of the functions are so very similar that the transition from one digital manipulation software/application to another is pretty easy.

This last quarter in 8th grade classes, we made a "Mount FaceMore" project where (as you can guess) we swapped out the faces on Mount Rushmore. After walking around the room and providing assistance to students, I realized that I kept answering the same questions over and over again. So, I decided to make a video all about the process. The first half is about about removing backgrounds using Pixlr, and the second half shows how to manipulate the layers and file types to save as:

This turned out to be pretty helpful in class, as students could refer back to the video (just skipping to the point that they needed help with), but also could get help if they worked from home, or were absent on the day that the project was first introduced or demonstrated. Win!

I really like teaching digital imaging, as it combines my love of art and computers in one happy place. The skills and concepts that students experience in this project are extremely helpful for future applications and across classes, when custom graphics or images can help demonstrate knowledge in other areas.

Do you have a favorite digital imaging project?

- Mrs. L.