I attended the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival last weekend and one of the highlights for me was watching the children’s book illustrator Terry Denton work a marquee full of adoring fans. He spoke well on creative processes and all the while drawing to illustrate his point

After the session I joined the hordes of kids for a book signing and introduced Terry to the Ipad. I then asked if he would draw one of his characters for my son in Adobe Ideas. (Ok, I lied, it was for me too hehehe)

Last night I was having a bit of a tinker on the Ipad using Adobe Ideas. It is a simple vector based drawing program with the ability to alter the opacity of colour. The program also allows you to email your ideas directly from within the program. You can also add a photo layer which offers the ability to create a greater variety of artwork.

Pros – it’s FREE!!! 50 levels of undo, email built in, integrates into Photoshop and Illustrator if you email as pdf, great gallery make browsing your work easy

Cons – could do with a text tool, a bit ‘clumsy’ drawing with your finger & manipulating the colour tool is a bit slow.

At the moment I’m still out on weather or not this tool will add to my work-flow. I like the way I can try out different colour schemes but I find pen and paper a much quicker way to explore design. I will however keep experimenting as that is how we discover what works for us.

Dear World,

Here is a  collection of Iphone ‘Art’ apps for you to explore and evaluate. How will you sort the ‘fluff’?

CoolIris, Make a Martian, Eastern Drawing, SketchBook X, Pop Art Light, Spawn Lite, Art Gallery, Solid Dots,
Photoshop Mobile, Dash of Colour, ArtLite, SketchMee, Poly Gra Lite, SculptMaster 3d free, For All Seasons & Random Pose.

Can you do me a favour and add your favourite Iphone Art apps as a comment.

cheers

Adrian

I recently used the software successfully with a group of 5 year olds as we explored the work of Franz Marc together. My plan was to use Voicethread to record their responses but alas the computer had other ideas.

I’m currently putting together a collection of reflection questions for art. I’ve included many of my favourites and am working on some new ones. I’ve placed the draft of this document online and left it free for anyone to add to. Feel free to add your favourite art reflection questions to it.

Edit the Google Document Here NB no log in is necessary (I hope)

cheers

Adrian

Over the last few years I’ve become very interested in creative process. What is it that enables some people to have an amazing output of creative ideas? How can we teach ‘creativity’? Can we truly teach creativity? Am I creative or am I doing what creative people do?

One of my favourite creativity tools is the SCAMPER Process. I particularly like to play around with the ‘Substitute’ & ‘Combine’ part of the process to produce ‘creative’ pieces of work.

In my ‘Dora Meets Sigmund’ comic I’ve ‘Substituted’: Comic Life for paper, digital photographs for drawings as well as ‘Combining’ Dora from my daughter’s doll house & Freud from my workspace. The dialog comes from ‘Combining’ aspects of a joke my cousin and I had via email. Thanks cuz!!!

Try a little SCAMPER yourself, you’ll be amazed with what you come up with.

I’ve just added four new flash movies to the Symmetry site that demonstrate:

Flips Across a Vertical Axis, Flips Across a Horizontal Axis, Slides, and Turns or Rotations.

A HUGE THANKYOU goes out to my Flash guru Andrew of onlineartschool.info fame for creating these. Feel free to check out his site when you need ideas for your art programs.

Today I’ve stumbled across an online version that those of you with despotic systems administrators might like to try.

These images look great when you get them printed out on photographic paper. They are a great fundraiser if you and your students make them into calendars for the parent community.

Personally I prefer the stand alone software as you can build images using your own library of photos. But this online mosaic creator site is a nice introduction.

Have fun with it.

Adrian

A huge thanks to Sharon in Scotland for suggesting stripcreator.com to go with the others free online comic strip generators listed on my site. It certainly has a lot more options than some of my older tools.

As an introductory activity to comic strip creation I have the kids bring in the ‘lamest’ joke they can find. They then have to create a comic strip out of it. It is an excellent way to discuss pun. For the ‘the usual suspects’ that don’t bring you a joke, Yahooligans has a really good lame joke section that they can peruse.

Here are a couple of ideas from my webpage for using sites like these:

- Use the websites provided to produce a short comic strip about something you are passionate about.

- Using the websites above create a comic strip of a joke that will make an adult laugh. NB you will need to use a clever play on words rather than something that will make a child laugh.

- In a group of 4 convert a fable into a comic strip. Hints – You will need to sub-task a lot and be very clear on the design decisions you all make.

The poetry scaffold is a step by step guide to creating a verbal collage about each student. It encourages reflection and experimentation.

My son added a Wordle to his blog based on his blog tags and I made mine by ‘Pasting a heap of text’ into Wordle. We enjoyed playing with this tool and I think your students will also.

Have fun with Wordle

Adrian

PS Try performing this poem by readng it with a different volume and intonation for each word. Maybe even with a soundtrack behind it of Miles Davis

Each year Hiroshima Day (August 6) just tends to slip under the radar in most schools. But I feel this day is so important that I spend the whole day on it in order to teach a little empathy.

One of the activities I do during the day is introduce ‘ecphrastic poetry’. This is a very powerful form that offers many opportunities to – ask questions, observe, interpret, infer, synthesize, hypothisise and, in this case, empathize.

Tonight I’ve put together a webpage of scaffolds that I’ve collected over the years that will help you on your way to adding ecphrastic poetry to your tool-box. I’ve also added a couple of teaching ideas and resources for Hiroshima Day.  NB I’ve added a .bmp file of the parchment and Peace Park Dome from the poem above for you to download, drop into an image editor and publish the poetry you create.

Adrian