Studio #1 Reflection

The artwork I have created is a picture, drawn with oil pastels, of my living room. I drew my picture at a birds eye view to try and get the entire thing. It was a little tricky in the fact that we only used primary colors and most of my house is done in grays and blacks. 

The learning target states that the student: 

LT: Identifies and uses primary colors.

AC:Selects and draws with red, yellow, and blue.

LT: Draws a familiar place.

AC:Makes a picture showing a room at home.

The activity that we participated in was perfect for this set of standards. We were given a piece of paper and the oil pastels. We spent some time talking about the primary colors and then were told to get them out of our crayon box. Once we got them out and showed the teacher that we were able to do this we were instructed to draw a picture. The picture had to be of  room within our homes. This made it so that the picture was of a familiar place. 

The only thing that I can think, in regards to children having issues with this assignment, is drawing the picture only using these colors. By this I mean that kids sometimes have an issue coloring things in a different color than they actually are. So if they are told to color a picture of a familiar place they are likely to want to color it in the colors that they know make it up. Having them only color the picture using primary colors may cause some of the children to run into difficulties. 

Art Tech Task #1

The tool that I choose for this week is the website BeFunky. This tool is under the Photo Tools section of our options. I decided to pick this tool because I honestly wasn't sure what a lot of the different sites were. I liked the name of this particular one so decided to go with it. This website allows you to edit photos. It gives you multiple options of different ways to upload pictures on the site. This can be done through your computer, webcam, BeFunky, Facebook, Computer, GoogleDrive, and Dropbox. Once you have uploaded the picture you want to edit you can do a lot of different things to your photo. You can do such things as: Layer, Edit, Touch Up, Effect, Artsy, Frames, Graphics, Overlays, Text, and Texture. The coolest thing I found in all of these different features was the ability to change the texture of the picture. The different texture options can make the picture look really cool. Just as well, you can layer different things on top of your picture. You can add a letter over top of it, numbers, different graphic designs and other things. The website gives you the option to write text within your photo and change the photo to appear to be Artsy or cartoon like. 

I would say this website would be a cool tool to use for students who were a little bit older. By this I mean, if I were working with preschoolers I am not sure I would necessarily go with this option. However, for maybe third, fourth, and fifth grade this would be a great tool. I think this would be a great tool because kids could use this tool to add things to their photo before embedding them into different projects that they are working on. They could add text to explain for photo better. Just as well, they could turn their photo into a "cartoon" and then try to mock it by painting their own version of the photo.

Under the visual arts standards I picked out the standard below in regards to this specific website. This is a third grade standard under the producing/performing section of the standards.

"Find and solve problems of personal relevance and interest when developing artmaking ideas." 

I thought this standard worked for this website because whoever is using this site has a lot of different options for what they can do to their picture. This requires the artist to decide what they want to do to their photo and what would work best for it. They have to make the decision of what will look best and execute that decision. 

Something I thought would be an interesting project to do with my students would be to do a history project on different artists at different times throughout history. Once we have completed the unit I would have the kids pick an artist and type of to study. They could use this website to try and make a photo look as much like the art style they've picked as they can using this website and its different features. I'm not sure how well this project would work out, however, they would be learning about different artists, history, the different elements of that time that was reflected in the art, as well as deciding for themselves the best way to recreate that art. 

This website is also an App that you can download onto your phone. After I realized this I actually decided to downloaded for my phone. I liked that I could edit pictures with it and make collages so I wanted it on my phone for future use. I would say in general this website is very user friendly. Everything is easily laid out and labeled. I would say the only challenge on this website would be the age restriction. I feel like this is more suitable for older kids. Just as well, a downfall to this site is that half of their functions are free but in order to have access to all of the functions their are certain ones you have to purchase. Their are certain options on this website that are apart of the Plus package and these ones require you to pay.

I chose a picture that was recently uploaded on Facebook. To my picture I decided to add a boarder, two graphics, and I made my photo a different texture. 

I'm not sure if this website would be a popularly used one in my classroom, however, I definitely wouldn't rule it out as something I would use!