Another Pastel Instruction Book
Posted by Jim Black in Advanced Higher Graphics on July 26, 2010
Our Advanced Higher Graphics pupils will be illustrating their main desktop publishing (DTP) piece using pastels this session. As I’m a beginner myself with the medium, I’ve been practicing (see earlier post) and reading instruction books.
A few days ago I purchased:
Painting Beautiful Skin Tones with Color & Light, by Chris Saper.
In the introduction of her book, Ms Saper states:
‘Intuitive instruction – “just pick out some color,” “use color that expresses the way you feel” – has never helped me. But instructors who have taught me how to see – what to look for and why – have given me tools I can use for a lifetime. This book is designed to give you tools you can use, too.
The book is superb, and covers portrait painting with oils, watercolour and especially pastels, really well. It’s particularly strong on colour theory and colour use, and breaks it down in to clear do and don’t guidelines. These guidelines are relevant to any branch of painting, not just portraiture. The book is beautifully illustrated by Ms Saper, using step by step views of her own paintings, which are stunning.
Ms Saper’s web site is at:
As well as displaying examples of her work, she lists her fees for undertaking portraits. I expect she’s one of the few artists around who earns a living from traditional portraiture.
Ms Saper has written a second book and, interestingly, has chosen to publish it via Blurb.com, the same ‘on-demand’ printer we’ve used for our pupils’ children’s story books. It’s at:
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/152139
Jim
James Gentles’ Aerial Photography
Posted by Jim Black in school campus on June 2, 2010
At a recent parents’ night, James Gentles offered to visit us to take some aerial photos of the school. Mr Gentles is the designer of a gadget which enables a camera to be controlled remotely, and he mounts his camera on a kite line.
On his web site, Mr Gentles has lots of stunning aerial photos. Take a look.
Monday 31st May brought a day with enough wind to fly a kite and camera rig safely, and Mr Gentles was able to visit during school hours. This allowed us the chance to deploy a couple of classes of S1 pupils to pose for the camera; standing on the tarmac to spell out ‘RHS’.
You’ll see from the photos that Mr Gentles tethers himself to his kite and dons a belt with lots of radio control gear around his waist. He also uses a viewing device to see what his camera sees. The system is ingenious.
On the day, Mr Gentles used a ‘delta’ style kite which measured two metres across. If there’d been less wind he’d have flown one with a three metre wing span, to achieve the required lift.
We’d like to thank Mr Gentles for taking the time to visit and provide these photos.
Napier University Degree Show 2010
Posted by Jim Black in Former Pupils on May 15, 2010
On Wednesday 12th May, Mr Stevenson, Mrs Hislop, Mr Myles and I attended the opening night at Napier’s show. On display was the work of Product Design graduates Anne-Lise MacKenzie, Pamela Davidson, Kirsty Dick and Andrew Buchan.
Anne-Lise is now considering enrolling in a Masters course in Glasgow, Pamela is about to embark on another degree, in Psychology, and Andrew and Kirsty hope to go in to industry.
Also on display, was work by former pupil Scott Tweeddale, who is near to completing a Masters in Interaction Design. Scott is off to Cambridge University in the autumn to do a post graduate course in teaching.
We took a look around the Graphic Design course work too. This course is only three years old, so its first degree show will be next year. Work on display by former pupils included Adam Robertson, Naomi Gibson, David King and Kenny Milne.
S2 Bridge Project
Posted by Krysia Smyth in Uncategorized on May 14, 2010
Our second year class have completed their bridge building project with some excellent results. Mr Cockburn our student teacher had the class for the first four lessons where they investigated lots of different bridge types, built some arch bridges and learnt about triangulation.
Mrs Smyth then took the class forward to designing and building their own bridges. The class were set tight parameters about what the bridge had to be:
- constructed from newspaper and scellotape,
- suspend a minium of 500g for 20 seconds
- be free standing (can’t stick bridge to desk)
- span a gap of 500mm
- be a maximum of 250mm height, 100mm width
Each team was scored in various area:
- Weight held
- Weight of bridge (the lighter the better)
- Construction of joints/bridge
- Teamwork
- Cost (1 broadsheet of newspaper cost £1000, 500mm of scellotape cost £500)
Second year, I would like you to evaluate the success of this project and provide me with some good honest feedback about how well (or bad) you thought the whole project went.
1. Describe 2 new things that you learned during the project.
2. Describe 1 thing that you thought was particularly tricky.
3. What was your favourite part of the project and why?
4. What could you have done better during the project? You can talk about the group work or when you were working on your own
5. And lastly what could your teacher have done better (e.g. what could be done better for next year)?
Wacom Bamboo Graphic Tablets
Posted by Jim Black in Higher Graphics on May 8, 2010
A few months ago we bid for ‘Determined to Succeed’ funding to purchase twenty graphic tablets. We were granted funds to purchase ten, and advised to apply next time around for funding for another ten.
Our funding bid specified that the tablets would be a ‘whole school’ resource. This post is a review, with accompanying pupil work, for the benefit of other teachers here at school who may be interested in using them.
1. Make and model.
The tablets are the ‘Bamboo Pen and Touch’ model by Wacom. They cost around seventy pounds each.
2. Software installation.
Provided you have ‘administrator access’ to the computers at school, the software installs in the usual way from the disc provided. However, if you want to get the most up to date release of the software, visit Wacom’s site and download it, then install.
3. Use
Pupils took to them immediately and they’ve proved especially useful for digital drawing. They’re much easier to draw with than a mouse. It’s easy to set the two buttons on the pen of the mouse to left click, right click or double click; whatever you find useful. Pupils are very comfortable accessing the control options and doing this. Although the active (sensitive) drawing surface area of the tablet is quite small at around 160×110 mm, it is easy to achieve controlled pen strokes.
4. ’Pen and Touch’
Pupils didn’t find the ‘touch’ controls – similar to those on an i-Phone – of much use. I suspect that if our computers were a bit more powerful, and had graphic cards, there’d be less of a time lag evident when using the touch controls. Conversely, the pressure sensitivity feature of the pen works really well. Provided you’re using the tablet with a programme that recognises pen pressure sensitivity, pressing harder with the pen can be set to increase line width, or opacity, or rate of ink flow etc. Our pupils have been using the tablets with ‘Gimp’ primarily. Gimp is an open source (free to download and use) alternative to Photoshop. It’s good for digital painting and photo manipulation. The tablets have also been used with ‘Inkscape’, another free drawing programme, and with Serif PagePlus and Scribus – both DTP programmes. PagePlus is a commercial programme, but Scribus is free to download and use, and is our preferred option for Advanced Higher Graphics pupils laying out magazine articles etc.
5. Setting up and storage
The tablets plug in to any USB socket. When using with particular drawing programmes, experiment to find out if you need to plug the tablet in before launching the programme, or visa versa. The tablets appear to be reasonably robust, though the nibs of the pens may be liable to damage. This may be because of the pressure sensitivity feature of the pen. However, each pen comes with several replacement nibs. Our funding allowed us to purchase a few extra pens, in case of future damage. Each tablet has a small fabric loop that the pens slide in to, for storage. This is a very useful feature. Our box of ten tablets is small and light enough to transport around school. One pupil can easily carry it.
6. Summary
We’re happy with our purchase. The tablets have proved useful and popular and we’ll be bidding for another ten in future.
7. Borrowing the tablets
Check with us beforehand to confirm availability, then nominate one of your more responsible pupils to collect and return them. A second pupil should also be sent, to open doors. If you’d like a bit of initial instruction in using them, contact me. I’ll be happy to get you started.
8. Examples of pupil work.
In addition to the slide show included with this post, examples of pupil work created with the aid of a graphic tablet are available to view as follows:
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1261007 – Robert Hackett
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1317051 – Rachel O’Donnell
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1259063 – Elliot Sutherland
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1277908 – Rebecca French
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1259414 – Kaitlin Pietersen
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1320058 – Ben Muir
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1267778 – Hamish Gentles
Advanced Higher Graphics Bowling & Meal
Posted by Jim Black in Advanced Higher Graphics on May 7, 2010
On Tuesday 04 May most of the class went bowling, then on for a meal, to mark the end of the course. A huge number of photos were taken, as the camera was passed from person to person.
In past years, we’ve invited along former pupils who’ve studied Advanced Higher Graphics, but we didn’t get organised early enough to be in shape to do so this time.
At Fountain Park, we had two sessions of bowling, with Michael winning both games. Around 9 pm we went next door to Nando’s restaurant.
At Nando’s our waiter was former Royal High pupil Chris Riva. Late in the evening we were joined by Graham Carolan, another former Royal High pupil. Graham expects to be posted to Afghanistan with the army, later in the year.
S3 Craft & Design – Rocking Toys
Posted by Jim Black in Rocking Toys on April 30, 2010
Progress photos taken on 30 April 2010 by Kennedy Adamson.
You’ll notice from the photos that the rocking toy incorporates a wide range of materials and processes. This helps reduce bottlenecks during manufacturing, as there are only two wood lathes and two metal lathes in the room. Pupils have access to casting, forging and brazing facilities in an adjacent room, which has a large window to allow supervision. Usually therefore, pupils have a choice of tasks to progress. This does make lessons rather busy for the teacher though, with so many machines and processes running at once.
It may not be evident from the photos that S6 Prefect Andrew Goudie does a lot of work advising and supervising. The S3 pupils call him ‘Chief’. This session he has enabled workshop lessons to proceed particularly smoothly.
Class 1j Building Bookends
Posted by Jim Black in Uncategorized on April 30, 2010
Afton Davidson took this batch of workshop photos on 28 April, while most of her classmates were building bookends.
This is the class’s second practical project. The first was a wind chime.
Advanced Higher Graphics ‘Visuals’, 2010 – 2011
Posted by Jim Black in Advanced Higher Graphics on April 10, 2010
Last year we were fortunate to have Myrna MacLeod visit us and deliver a talk. Myrna is the lead tutor of the Graphic Design course at Napier University. She made it clear that much of the content of Graphic Communication courses is not of use to her in deciding whether a pupil should be offered a place on her course. Since then, we’ve been looking at ways to satisfy her requirements, as a number of our pupils are applying for entry to this type of course each year.
The ‘visuals’ element of the Advanced Higher Graphics course offers the opportunity to produce portfolio work that may be more useful to pupils applying for graphic design courses. Over the years, the visuals that pupils have produced at Royal High have been a bit disappointing, and not to the standard that would allow them to be included in a portfolio. There have been highlights though -
http://www.royalhigh.edin.sch.uk/departments/departments/CDT/ahgc_2004_asuna_images/asuna_visual1b.jpg
http://www.royalhigh.edin.sch.uk/departments/departments/CDT/ahgc_2004_asuna_images/asuna_visual2b.jpg
http://www.royalhigh.edin.sch.uk/departments/departments/CDT/ahgc_2004_sarah_images/sarah_visual1a.jpg
http://www.royalhigh.edin.sch.uk/departments/departments/CDT/ahgc_0405/zoe/zoe_visual1a.jpg
http://www.royalhigh.edin.sch.uk/departments/departments/CDT/ahgc_0405/zoe/zoe_visual3a.jpg
In the coming session, I anticipate that pupils will combine drawings in pastel with tracing paper overlays, to create their visuals. Using a tracing paper overlay will allow the pastel drawing to remain a ’stand alone’ portfolio item as well as be a course visual. Pupils will scan their pastel drawings and actually incorporate them in their final DTP pieces, perhaps manipulating them in Gimp along the way. Pupils will set up still life compositions, photograph them and use the photos to help investigate composition. They’ll also use Inkscape to produce vector traces of their photos, to investigate tone / value, and produce ‘value’ sketches. As we have very little space to keep still life object groups assembled, I anticipate that pupils will work from their photos and value sketches to produce their pastel drawings.
Until a few days ago I had almost no experience in using pastels. I’ve now worked through some of the exercises in the ‘Pastel Workbook’ by Jackie Simmonds and found pastels to be relatively straightforward to use. It’s a quick process and it’s easy to produce strong colours, though finished drawings are going to be tricky to store, to avoid smudging.
As an alternative or addition to pastels, pupils who already have watercolour skills will be encouraged to utilise them in the coming session.
I’m also working on a clay modelling ‘visuals’ project that will investigate incised letterforms and calligraphy and may incorporate texturing work using a rapid prototyped calligraphic stamp. I anticipate that pupils will produce their own stamps in-house, modelling them in Pro/Engineer or Blender, then printing them on our (not quite assembled yet) Rapman. I’ll post info in due course.
S1 and S2 Flight Project
This is a project I’ve run with classes of all ages.
When there’s been plenty of time available, I’ve taught a bit about aeronautics, aeroplane control surfaces, the aerofoil cross-section, pitch, yaw and roll. I’ve also covered a bit about the history of manned flight. Pupils have built paper darts and tried to get them to roll, pitch or yaw. They’ve then worked in teams to construct and fly a kite. At other times, the whole project has consisted of only one lesson, when teams of pupils constructed a kite in around half an hour, then flew it in the remaining time.
The photos in this article shows pupils in class 1c constructing their kites and pupils in class 2d flying theirs. I did this project with them as they couldn’t gain access to our workshops, due to S4 Craft & Design classes taking priority.
The kites are usually constructed in teams of three. One pupil follows me step-by-step, constructing the kite, while another makes the tails. The third team member prepares a sheet of thumbnail designs for decorative graphics, for selection by team mates.
The kite design requires a sheet of A3 size paper, some masking tape, double sided tape, and a length of pine, approximately three millimetres square in cross section. The kite design is taken from the book ‘One Hour Kites’ by Jim Rowlands. Usually, provided there’s a breeze, all teams manage to get their kite to fly.
There are examples of kites from previous years on our web site, along with links to a number of resources at -
http://www.royalhigh.edin.sch.uk/departments/departments/CDT/s2%20flight%20project%202001%20pg1.html