CDTlog

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.