I'm very excited about our Summer Enrichment Program! Last year we started with this successful program, and with our Digital Art Course. Our Digital Art Course is short (three weeks), but we will use our time wisely and learn the basics of Adobe Photoshop - the image-editing application. We will use Mac computers and we will create original digital art work. This course is an introduction to this great program.
The goal is to cultivate artistic talent and encourage creativity, while completing some interesting exercises. We will also print some of the digital art work created. We will have fun learning and creating this "cool" work.
Photoshop is a powerful image-editing application with a wealth of tools and commands for working on digital images or bitmaps. There are utilities for retouching, color correcting, cropping, rotating, resizing and more. There is also a great number of creative filters to change, improve and customize our pictures. Photoshop is used in advertising agencies, publishing companies and many other jobs; check: possiblejobs.
First, you will familiarize yourself with the Photoshop "Toolbox;" especially the following tools: The Move Tool, The Rectangular Marquee Tool, The Elliptical Marquee Tool, The Magnetic Lasso Tool, The Stamp Tool, The History Brush Tool, The Crop Tool, The Eraser Tool and the Type Tool.
You will learn the importance of creating "layers" in Photoshop and how to manipulate these layers in the Layers Palette. The "Layers Palette" is your essential tool for working with layers. Photoshop's layers can be considered separate films or transparent sheets. These layers can be visible or hidden. You will also learn how to use Blending Options (a great feature to add shadows, inner glows, outer glows, patterns, embossing, and other effects on your images and text).There's a lot to learn in a short period of time; so we will concentrate mostly on creating some fun exercises while learning how to use this application.
Vocabulary: digital, digitize, binary, bit, byte, bitmap, pixels, resolution, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, JPEG, digital cameras, megapixels, multimegapixels. Check the link "What is Digital" on the top-right side of this blog to view a short movie that will explain very clearly what this term means, and how all the information we put into our computers, iPods, digital cameras and other electronic gadgets (numbers, text, sound, music, pictures and videos) is converted into "digital codes" - digital language - which is really just a string of ones and zeros, or binary numbers. Check it out! It's pretty interesting and since we live in a "digital" world, we must at least learn what this term means.
Also check: What Is Digital Art? | eHow.com (just click on the left side - blue)
I hope this course encourages you to learn more about new digital technologies and the many wonderful applications out there that allow us to create great digital art. Enjoy!
