PERSONAL, LEARNING & THINKING SKILLS

Each half-term you will be asked to look back over your progress and see where you have managed to demonstrate your abilities across six key areas, called Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills. These are skills that run-alongside the creative, media-specific skills and abilities you have developed on your coursework and can be remembered using the acronym STRIPE (Self-manager; Team-worker; Reflective-learner; Innovative-learner; Participator and Enquiring-learner):

SELF-MANAGER

 

TEAM-WORKER

REFLECTIVE-LEARNER

INNOVATIVE-LEARNER

PARTICIPATOR

ENQUIRING-LEARNER

 

Creating a Digital Sketchbook Page

You should be starting to think about presenting your work in your digital sketchbook.

Annotate (describe) your images with notes explaining the techniques and methods you've used.

Add reference material where appropriate (i.e. influences or other possible ideas)

You should post screengrabs (CMD+SHIFT+3) of your pages as you produce them to your blog and you should keep going back to them to make changes and add new material.

OLIVER JEFFERS PAGE FACSIMILE (COPY) CHALLENGE

In order to test how well your skills have developed using Adobe Photoshop you have been set a practical challenge. You must create a facsimile, or copy of the above page from Oliver Jeffers childrens book, The Incredible Book-Eating Boy

In order to successfully complete the challenge you will need to use all of the tools and techniques you have been introduced to over the last six weeks as well as improvising your own solutions to a few problems you haven't encountered before

To help you get started, you have been provided with a number of assets (files) to speed things up, including backgrounds & clip art, scanned artwork from the book and oliver jeffers own preliminary sketches. Each of these will need to be edited in various ways to best replicate the original page.

You can download the files individually from the gallery above or as a zip file from this link: http://www.filedropper.com/jeffers

You will have to find appropriate fonts to use as well as creating your own handwritten tex effects either with pen and paper or the graphics tablet

Your New Image should be set up using the following pre-set:

However, before you begin to recreate the original page, make sure that your file is orientated Landscape rather than Portrait

You must ensure that you have labelled all of your layers accurately and systematically and must save your work as a PSD file and as a JPG for uploading to tumblr

You should keep a note in your exercise book of how you go about each stage as well as taking screengrabs of your work in progress, as you will be expected to produce an evaluation document detailing your process by Friday

CRITICAL STUDY GUIDELINES

Follow the guidelines below in order to cover all the points you need:

  • NAME of ARTIST, date of birth, death, nationality. You should write a brief background about the artist to include the main events in their professional and personal lives.
  • List the TITLE of the art work, and the date it was completed
  • Say why you have chosen this example. In what ways does it relate to your chosen theme or focus?
  • SUBJECT MATTER – Describe the piece of work.

Use descriptive and evocative vocabulary to communicate what you see. 

  • What is in the artwork / image, what can you see?

(Try to use words and references to background, mid-ground, foreground). 

  • Look at the subject matter chosen by the artist. Describe the ideas and messages it communicates and how it communicates them.
  • What has the artwork / image been produced for?
  • Analyse the composition of the artwork / image.

How have the things that are in the artwork been arranged, composed, put together? (Consider the formal elements, focal point, devices to lead the viewer’s eye around the artwork / image. Discuss the arrangement of the composition).

  • Who would be the intended viewer / audience of the artwork?
  • METHODS and MATERIALS – what sort of media has been used – paint, pastel, collage, charcoal, 2D / 3D media and techniques, etc? Describe how it has been applied / manipulated? Thickly? Thinly? Is it roughly or smoothly applied?
  • LINES, MARKMAKING, PATTERN – describe the techniques used – use appropriate technical language – thick, thin, hatching, etc.
  • COMPOSITION, SCALE – describe using appropriate vocabulary / words – focal point, devices to lead the viewer’s eye around the picture – curves, directional lines, etc., enlargement / zoom-in, verticals / horizontals, etc.
  • TONE – identify the light / dark areas – say how the tone has been used to give depth, distance, shape (3D), impact, emphasis.
  • COLOUR – use descriptive language to describe the colours used and any colour relationships – primary, secondary, complementary, harmonious, etc.
  • TEXTURE – either actual or implied surface texture. How has this been achieved?
  • YOUR PERSONAL OPINION AND OBSERVATIONS – what you think about the work and why? This can be worked into your analysis as you go along using examples to illustrate your ideas.

PORTRAITURE PHOTOSHOP STUDY

Once you have identified a portrait that you admire, create your own study of the piece using Photoshop. Focus on a particular area of the portrait and try to recreate it as accurately as possible using whatever digital techniques and tools will help you to produce as close a copy as you can.