October 2011 Archives

While searching blogs, I stumbled across one that was owned by Vector Art. It is an online resource for digital illustrators, graphic designers and flash artists. It's purpose is to offer free resources to the creative community. On Vector Blog you can find tutorials on how to create clip art and to improve your digital drawing skills. It is a blog where artists post their digital drawings, logos and clippings from around the world.

What drew my attention was that there are several blog entries about logo making. It has a tutorial that shows you the steps of brainstorming to bringing it to become an actual peice of art. I believe that logo making would be a great thing to incorperate into a class room. It would teach students about the advertisment world of art and give them an idea of how logos are made up to draw your attention to the product and make it look appealing.

I was thinking that It would be a great interductory to designing your own images using adobe. The student would come up with their own logo, it could be their interest, their name, the way they look, anything that represents them. After showing them different logos, how they have transformed over the years, and explaining how much art work and planning goes into advertisment, I would have them start sketching their ideas. I would have the students pick out their top 3 and elaberate on those and then finally decide on a logo they liked. After that they would learn how to use tool in Photo Shop or Illustrator and design their logo.
Having them print out their logos and art work around the room would look really neat. I am sure they would all be very different and represent each kid. They would have gotten an idea of what goes into making a logo and it would bring digital art to everday life for them.

http://vector-art.blogspot.com/

The following were some neat logo Ideas from the website.

Some logos are always changing. Here is a video I thought was a good example of that.

"Vector Art Best Things in Life Are Free." Vector Art - A Digital Illustration Blog. Vector
Art. Web. 25 Oct. 2011. .

The book Interactions for intersections is a great resource for Art Educators. Each chapter was very interesting me and focused on major changes, great ideas and up to date facts about technology not on in Art Eduction but in the world today. There are chapters on ideas for teaching, how the word is changing, how the changes have impacted students and teachers and the one that I decided to focus on; "Digital Journals: The Past, Present and Future of Electronic Portfolios for Visual Culture Learners by Shei Chau Wang.

In this chapter the author focuses on digital journals. This is my first digital journal and I am beginning to understand what the benefits of having this for a class is. It is easily, nature friends, allows others to learn for your postings, allows you to get feed back from others, and the list goes on. In the article he focuses on the benefits of having e- portfolios. Having an e-portfolio is all of those things, it also looks professional and is easy to update and change.

Although the benefits are obvious of having a digital portfolio there are down sides. Some listed in the book are educational, aesthetic taste and visual quality, identity and authorship, communication and language issues and technological issues. This section raises a good point, with e- portfolios there is the issue of forgetting why you have them (to analyze and critic), loosing aesthetic taste and making it all one medium viewing, using media to make your work better (but not in your own way), and communication may get tampered with as well. I'm not sure about everyone else but when I am online, I tend to not capitalize spell out made up or abbreviated words, and my language is not as clear. When using the internet as a means of communicating out english language may evolved into something that is not as efficient and cannot express as much as we would like.

This chapter has raised some pros and cons of using a e- portfolio to me. I believe that when I have the time I will try create a presentable one because it would be a great way to show employers your work. I also believe it is important to have another one besides online. As a teacher it will most likely be a method that I use in a class to critic and have discussions about students work. In other classes at UMD we have discussions and I believe they are beneficial.

http://fun-funzeela.blogspot.com

On this website there is a section that talks about how a English Classroom has used a e-portfolio to make work more accessable and easy to manage in the classroom. The following is a video from that class.

"English Speaker." English Speaker. Web. 10 Oct. 2011. funzeela.blogspot.com/>.

Sweeny, Robert W. Inter/actions/inter/sections: Art Education in a Digital Visual Culture.
Reston, VA: National Art Education Association, 2011. Print.