The Carrot Revolution: A Blog About Art Education... and Vegetables.

Amaya Zoey

2009-11-21T03:10:00.001-08:00

Please welcome to the world my very own little revolutionary, Amaya Zoey.

Portrait Party Redux

2009-11-14T04:02:00.000-08:00

Rama Hughes recently posted about the portrait party that my foundations class shared with Melissa Woodland's class from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania last year. I had posted the drawings that my students had done, but just realized that I never posted the results that we received back a few weeks later (it was the end of the year and things get so busy).

Here's a link to her students' awesome drawings of my students.

Thanks again to Melissa and her students, as well as Rama for the inspiration!

China... Alive!

2009-11-10T19:47:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in the last post, our students recently returned from the farthest reaches of the Middle Kingdom, armed with nothing but their cameras and their wits about them*.

The students chose some of their favorite shots for a school photo contest, and they'll be editing more of their work in the coming week. Here's a sample of what they posted so far:

Find more photos like this on T H E . L E N S

*...and most of the other necessities needed for travel, although I understand that the internet was very spotty in some areas...

Turn it Around!

2009-11-10T01:30:00.000-08:00

I just got one of the best photography tips ever from a student in class today.

Our students came back last week from our "China Alive" field trips. The 9th and 10th grades travel in groups to various locations around China. I gave my students a 'photography scavenger hunt' to do on their journeys. Today was our critique, and one of my students came back with this shot:

I asked him how he got the shot- he has his own DSLR camera, but didn't have a Macro lens, as far as I knew.

I was right, he didn't. Instead, he took off the simple kit lens that came with the camera, and turned it around, focusing through the wrong end.

I gave it a try, and sure enough, it works! Its probably not a great habit to get into- shooting with the lens off, but if you're in a pinch and have a great opportunity for an extreme close-up, that's a valuable tip!

Thanks Shan Yuan!

Flowers Are Red, Young Ma...mal.

2009-11-09T05:59:00.000-08:00

If an elephant makes it, is it art?

Its hard to know what exactly is happening here. Clearly the elephants are painting. Are they receiving instructions from their keepers in the form of taps or whispers? Do they have a code that is used to suggest 'line' or 'dab'? Or are they actually painting something that they were taught?

Watching the elephants play, bathe, eat, and interact with people at The Maesa Elephant Camp in Chiang Mai, Thailand, makes one thing remarkable clear; they are loving, gentle, and sharp as tacks. Watching them paint though, is truly extraordinary.

Here are some photos of the elephants painting, and some elephant paintings:

Validation!

2009-11-03T21:04:00.000-08:00

My IB Film Year 2 students are brainstorming their final narrative project. We scrapped our original idea- sometimes that's part of the process. I was looking online this morning for some new inspirational short films to show them. This is perhaps one of the best short films I've seen in years- it's fun, its well shot, its clever, and its simple.

I'll be showing it to my IB Film class next week. Kurt Kuenne's Validation:

RIP, Artists

2009-10-31T17:00:00.000-07:00

Sketch2Photo is a powerful new tool that will make all artists redundant in the near future. With a simple sketch and guiding text, this powerful program scours the web for images that match your design.

The program creates a composition based on forms it identifies in photos to create a photo-collage based on your own arrangement.

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

Obviously, as technologies such as this one are perfected the human artist will just be an amusing relic of the past, and the job of the art educator will be in creating programs that automatically develop interesting artwork.

21st Century Skills? Let's talk about 22nd Century Skills....

Assuming this idea is expanded and improved, is Sketch2Photo something that you'd use in your classroom to help students plan a composition?

Cheap Tripod? Great Tip.

2009-10-29T22:38:00.000-07:00

Here's a smart little trick for getting smoother camera movements with inexpensive tripods:

King of Photoshop?

2009-10-27T00:36:00.000-07:00

I found this interesting article over at Gizmodo entitled Norman Rockwell: The Original King of Photoshop. I'm not sure I agree with the premise; that because he created his paintings out of composites of various photos that he was a sort of 'pre-photoshop photoshopper'. Using various models together as studies for a final image (photographic or not) is an age old technique. However, seeing the photographs that Rockwell used along side the finished project would be great for students.

I have this feeling that when most students look at the work of professional/successful artists, they imagine that they are just so good that they are able to paint or draw whatever they want from their minds. That's why I love any resource I can find that shares the resources, research, trials, sketches, and reference material that artists have drawn upon.

I don't know about you, but I think I need this book for my shelf.

In fact, this would come at the perfect time for our current IB Art lesson (if I could easily pick this book up in China). Students are creating self portraits that have coded messages about themselves, their histories and their cultures. For this project, I have had them collect reference material from their homes, photo albums, and mixed this with images that they are either photographing or taking from life.

...and look! The Rockwell book is sold together with Imaginative Realism (blogged about earlier here) for a reduced price. Its my lucky day!

Now if only I could get Amazon to throw me a dime for shilling for them, it would really be my lucky day...

Dispatches from the Revolution 10/23/2009

2009-10-22T17:30:00.001-07:00

The Real Secret to Taking Spectacular Photos
tags: Photography

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Dispatches from the Revolution 10/22/2009

2009-10-21T17:31:00.001-07:00

50 Excellent Blogs About Education Reform
tags: activism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Inspiration

2009-10-18T08:57:00.000-07:00

Six revisions suggests 10 Unusual Places to Get Design Inspiration.

Is it just me, or do these places not seem so unusual? Not that these are bad ideas at all; but are any designers really reading this and going "Woah! Yeah- art history, I never thought of that!"

...and you'll forgive me if I'm being a bit snobby, but you can tell the principal to fire me the day I tell my kids to go to the mall for inspiration. Inspiration? I only go to the mall out of desperation.

To be fair though, this is a page for designers, not students, and I really don't know what qualifies as the 'usual' forms of inspiration for designers (although I have a sneaking suspicion that it has something to do with coffee, Kinder Eggs, and watching repeats of Mad Men). For art classes, however, this is actually quite a good list for advanced and IB students who are expected to work independently as they develop their own ideas and themes.

Except for the bit about the malls.

Look Familiar?

2009-10-14T22:41:00.000-07:00

I haven't really had a chance to sit down and write about my art-overload this summer, and every time I try, I just become overwhelmed. So, I'm breaking it down into smaller scattered posts. In July I attended the IB Art workshop in Berlin, and used that as a jumping off point to see a little bit of southern France and then head over to the Venice Biennial. I'm putting a little video together of my favorite Biennial exhibits, but in the meantime, this was one of my favorite things to see this summer:

Look familiar?

There was something truly amazing in walking across the square and seeing a building that you know so well for the first time- and when its as colorful and vibrant as you'd imagined, its all the more magical. Look at that sky! How is the sky that blue in Arles?

This is one of the stops on the Van Gogh walking tour of Arles. Simply follow in the steps of Vincent to see the locations that he painted. We didn't get to all of the spots. Sadly; there is really just too much to see in south France.

Perhaps they need to spread some of their scenery and history to other parts of the world, I mean, in all fairness....

However, when you reach a point where he placed his canvas, there is a reproduction of the work he created there and a short description. Interestingly, in some places its obvious, in other places, its not obvious, or only partially so.

Although it would be an unlikely possibility, it seems to me a good idea to have a zoning law preventing gas stations from opening up anywhere in the line of site from which Van Gogh worked.

I won't hold my breath on that.

Polaroid Returns!

2009-10-13T17:02:00.000-07:00

Have you been filling that empty hole in your soul with freeware that mimics technology of days gone by? As much as I love my little desktop camera, nothing quite replaces the cheap clunky plastic box with the satisfying snap and churning gears.

Here's some news that will fill that empty awkward shaped space- polaroid cameras are coming back.

...and while there are plenty of ways to get that 'polaroid feeling' with programs like Poladroid or some crafty use of photoshop, you can't do neat things like polaroid transfers from your desktop.

Why now? Maybe because others have seen the inherent desire for instant photographic gratification?

Whatever their reason, I'm saving a budget line item and putting on my party hat.

Photo credit: Jeff Zoet.

50 Greatest Animations

2009-10-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

I usually find more fun in finding the shocking omissions or ridiculous inclusions of 'top 10' type lists, but I have to say- Time Out's 50 Greatest Animated Films is pretty spot on. No, its not perfect. Maybe because they're all features, they ignore gems like Oskar Fischinger's Early Abstractions, or Don Hertzfeld's Rejected, but also missing is Jan Svankmajer's feature Alice.

That's all good and well, and there are some films they'd included that I wouldn't have but...

... much to my surprise, I actually agree with their top film selection.

3D Abstractions

2009-10-10T00:35:00.001-07:00

One thing I just don't see enough of, are examples of non-representational 3D digital art. This piece by Makoto Yakubi reminds me a lot of the work of one of my favorite animators, Oskar Fischinger. This is the sort of thing I'd imagine he'd be making were he alive today.

This video, White Box, also by Yakubi, shows a beautiful mix of live action and animation, and describes 'thinking outside the box' without using those all too common words:

You can see Yakubi's other videos here.

WANT

2009-10-09T00:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not ready to call it "geek week" at the revolution... but I'm getting close...

James Gurney, (author of Dinotopia) creates this guide to realistically painting things that you can't get to actually model for you. He describes Imaginative Realism as a guide to flexing your imagination muscle, not a 'how to' book. Furthermore, it sounds like he really breaks ground with new ideas for conceptualizing his ideas... according to Gurney;

Because the art vocabulary in English lacks some words to describe key concepts, I have had to invent several terms such as clustering and shapewelding to describe compositional principles that artists often think about but lack the vocabulary to talk about. You’ll find those terms defined in the glossary in the back of the book.

This looks like something I want on my bookshelves... one at home and one at school.

Best. Collaborative. Project. Ever.

2009-10-08T07:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I mean aside from Rotoball.

Thanks to Frank for finding my dream project- it embodies everything I love about collaboration, challenged based learning, digital media, and... Star Wars.

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Fans recreate the entire film in 15 second clips (hey.... wait a minute... that sounds familiar... ) in whatever manner or style they can imagine. Unfortunately, all the clips are currently taken... but no worries, the clips resurface if they don't get finished in 30 days. We'll just have to be patient and wait for our 15 seconds of fame to become available*

*How many times can I write posts about Andy Warhol and Star Wars together?

Shanghai Sculpture

2009-10-07T21:39:00.000-07:00

This week is the mid-autumn festival (or moon festival) here in China, and Kim and I borrowed our friends apartment so that we could pretend that we live downtown. That gave us a bit of a chance to do a little more exploring. One thing we found was the Shanghai Sculpture Space- which is a great sculpture and arts ground.

Unfortunately, like many other art spaces here, the documentation wasn't great, so I don't have a lot of information about the work shown below- but there were some great things to see (and I got to have a little more fun with my fish eye lens):

Minimalist and More

2009-10-02T00:21:00.000-07:00

I have to admit it, I'm kind of in love with Graphic Nothing's (Gary Clarke's) Movie posters for Minimalists. They remind me of those flimsy classic paperbacks you used to see in bookstores for a dollar (do they still sell those? I'm really out of touch with real world bookstores now).

It strikes me as an interesting project for students- communicate as much as possible, with as little as possible, as in this poster for Star Wars (What? Too soon for another geek post? Deal.). These are the rules that Clarke set for this project:

The vague rules were a circle, lowercase text & one or two images (not from the film) that relate to something in the film (which will not probably make sense unless you've seen the film!)

Sounds like a great challenge, and you could easily swap out those rules for other similar limitations.

Also check out his Child's Guide to Insects and Other Bugs - an investigation into the relationship between golden mean and entomology in the context of children's illustration. Maybe its just the 'about-to-be-a-dad' in me speaking, but I think I love these as much as his film posters. Heck, just check out his various sets- in many of them, you'll find a set of challenges he created for himself in taking something old and making it new. You'll likely find some inspiration here in the way he imposes limitations to explore new ideas.

Serendipitous Update: A tweet from The Mac Lab directed me towards these fantastic posters at Seek and Speak- between these two artists, I feel the need to completely redecorate the art room. Here's a poster for another one of my favorite films.

IB Art Workbooks

2009-09-30T17:13:00.000-07:00

IB Art is by far, the most challenging class I've taught. In addition to projects, students are required to research, reflect, analyze, and explore in their IB Workbooks to the tune of 4-5 pages a week. The students seem pretty up to the challenge. It's a great class. However, getting the workbook 'right' is no easy task. Its not a sketchbook, its not a journal, its not a notebook, and its not a scrapbook. Its all of those things, and more. I created this slide show to help them think about how to approach their workbook. The second half of the slideshow deals with how to use the book to approach a project, and ends with an introduction to our next project.

IB Art: Workbooks

View more presentations from dsgran.

If you teach IB Art, or use integrated work books in your class, feel free to use/edit/adapt for your purposes. This is available for download here.

In A Galaxy Far Far Away...

2009-09-30T02:23:00.000-07:00

...every body will be famous for 15 minutes. Link via Boing Boing.

Lomo Fish Eye

2009-09-26T22:27:00.000-07:00

This summer Kim bought me a Holga Lomography camera and a fisheye lens for my birthday. These fun little cameras give you the opportunity to work with this retro material called 'film' (which was the medium that photographers worked in between derrogotypes and digital), and it mimics the poor color quality which we once lamented and now idolize. The cameras themselves are inexpensive and the students seem to love the idea of giving their photographs a lomographic look. You don't need a special camera for that, just photoshop and one of many tutorials to get you started.

The neat thing about the fisheye lens though, is that its a cheap little add-on, and you can purchase an adaptor so that it fits on to your DSLR camera.

Below are some pictures I took at the Hongqaio Flower Market in Shanghai with the fisheye attached to the kit lens that comes with the Canon 450D.

Oh, but the fisheye wasn't meant for capturing natural beauty. This lens just begs to be used for silliness. Here are our cats:

I can has camera?

10 Easy Portoflio Solutions

2009-09-24T21:15:00.000-07:00

In the past I've made the last project for many of my classes the creation of a digital portfolio. For example, when I taught in New York my year three video classes would have to create a DVD portfolio, and my advanced photography classes had to make a digital sideshow. I can't help but notice how much has changed in the last few years, specifically, how easy it is to make an online portfolio.

For example, iWeb just keeps getting better and better. It used to be a little annoying if you didn't have a .mac account. You'd need to save and export everything to a folder, then use a separate ftp client to upload it to your website. With iLife 08, they added the ability to put in little html clips if you were so inclined - which was great news if you know how to code, and even better news if you wanted to embed a video or any of the other embeddable goodies out there in the internets. Then, with iLife 09, they added a built-in ftp client and that small time saver makes a huge difference.

However, not all of us have Macs, or want to build portfolios from scratch- lets face it, if we're doing it with a class, we'll need to commit to learning a little bit about good web design - that is a great idea if you can work it into your curriculum. However, if you don't have the time, or don't have a mac, here are 10 great alternatives from Spoongraphics.

Well, its actually just 9 great alternatives (or 7 great alternatives if you're looking only for unpaid sites) as the last one is advice for building your own.

Here's one more though, if your students are shooting film or video. Reel Clever (Thanks Jerry!) is a site to upload and share your show reel!

This year, I'm making time for this - for my intro classes as well. As our collective concept of "publishing" changes, and we can find authetentic audiences outside the walls of the classroom, the students interaction with their own art work can no longer end with 'turning it in'.

Quote of the Week

2009-09-24T21:03:00.000-07:00

(In reference to a cheap mechanical rabbit I bought for the 100 Kuai Challenge, which I'm working on as well)

Joy: You stripped it of all of its best assets! ...Eyeball-wise.