Materials
Traditional materials
Seven of the presentations develop work using traditional materials:
- Year 7: Drawing: Still life in pencil, Landscape in charcoal and Colour: Traditional
- Year 8: Cubism: Traditional and Masks: Traditional
- Year 9: Futurism: Traditional and Images and feelings: Traditional
The materials used in these presentations are simple variations of pencil, paint, chalks and crayons – all standard stock for the art room and students can use the presentations to develop their skills using these materials. However, given the main ideas, each presentation could also easily form a springboard for printmaking, collage, 3D work or other approaches depending on the resources available in your department (see Developing new projects for more ideas).
Digital techniques
The other five presentations use digital techniques to develop the images:
- Year 7: Colour: ICT
- Year 8: Cubism: ICT and Masks: ICT
- Year 9: Futurism: ICT and Images and feelings: ICT
These have all been created using Adobe Photoshop. Other software that offers very similar tools includes Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is a reduced version of Photoshop (and much cheaper), or Paint Shop Pro. Corel Draw is also widely used for art techniques. There are many others; often printers, cameras and scanners come with software to manipulate images in these ways. However, be aware that these free packages can be limited in what can be achieved.
The key tools which make the type of work demonstrated possible, are:
- filters to change the appearance of an image
- the ability to select different parts of an image to move them around
- layers.
These programs are sometimes quite complex, but the three principles above give a very flexible route into this type of software.