Today, I began the annual Renaissance Photoshop Project with Yoshiko Maruiwa, my favorite 6th grade Art teacher at The School at Columbia University. As part of the 6th grade integrated study of Florence and the Renaissance in English, Social Studies, Science, Art, Music, and Wellness, Yoshiko and I team-teach this Photoshop unit where students locate a Renaissance painting and layer themselves into it as either the main character or an additional character.

Here are the directions for our 3-day unit:

1. We talk about media literacy. Today, one girl said it was like "reading pictures." I liked that a lot. As a group, we defined media as the plural of medium and gave examples of both:

Media = how to convey or communicate information or mass communication, the news are described as "the media" and can share information using a variety of means (television, radio, internet, etc...)

Medium = how something is communicated or expressed: a drawing, painting, watercolor, television, email, texting, movies, music, commercial, song, newspaper, internet, magazine

2. We watch the Evolution video from Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty.

3. We talk about how easy it is to use technology to manipulate an image and why. (Marketing!)

4. We do a brief tour of the Google Art Project. (http://googleartproject.com)

With a team of Googlers working across many product areas we are able to harness the best of Google to power the Art Project experience. Few people will ever be lucky enough to be able to visit every museum or see every work of art they’re interested in but now many more can enjoy over 30 000 works of art from sculpture to architecture and drawings and explore over 150 collections from 40 countries, all in one place.

5. We talk about Artstor and it's subscription service which Columbia University pays for. We look at the Permitted and Prohibited uses. I remind them that it is super important to read the terms and conditions of a website so that they avoid doing anything illegal or unethical (whether intentionally or accidentally). Everything they do online public, permanent, and traceable. (http://artstor.org)

The ARTstor Digital Library is a nonprofit resource that provides more than one million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences with an accessible suite of software tools for teaching and research. Our community-built collections comprise contributions from outstanding international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists' estates.

6. Students choose a Renaissance painting from Artstor that they will manipulate. The directions for the project are here.

7. We talk about ownership of Art. Who owns the Mona Lisa? Yoshiko made a simple slideshow about variations of the Mona Lisa here. We discuss copyright and fair use and discuss Shepard Fairey's Obama Hope painting. My lesson plan is here.

As a lead-up activity to our InsideOut Project, I showed/reminded 8th graders how to do basic Photoshop stuff: layer, erase, select, fill, move, transform, etc. Initially, I asked students to create a rectangular collage of images that represent them - to take their inner thoughts/favorites/hopes and turn them inside out. After last night's announcement of Steve Jobs' death, I was reminded to Think Different. It's remarkable how much of a direct and indirect effect Steve Jobs had on me and my students; He was a key figure in determining which tools we use, how we use them, and towards what purpose. Today, I asked students to recall the iPod ads from a few years ago, and they had little difficulty describing the silhouetted forms dancing to music. Then, we figured out a way to add their silhouette as the topmost layer of their Photoshop file, and they filled this silhouette with images they'd already located.

The actual acitivity will take 2-3 class periods. Here are the steps:
1. Take your photo in front of monochromatic paper
2. Use Photoshop to delete everything but your image (magic wand and adjust tolerance as needed)
3. Replace your image and the background with two different solid colors
4. Use these spaces (inside or outside their silhouette) as a canvas to fill with images that describe you
5. Cite the web addresses of any photos found online.

One student asked, "What if I took the photo, like with my own camera?" Another kid replied, "Then you own it, so you don't have to cite it." Progress!

(download)

Click here to download:

just-found-out-about-the-app-masterpieceme-via-agardnahh-edchat-artsed-edcampphilly-CzADhDiaCgDoEfrIBjui.zip (466 KB)

Download Masterpiece Me! here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/masterpiece-me/id428061219?mt=8

I just found out about Masterpiece Me! from another Technology Integrator at my school, Andrew Gardner (@agardnahh), who works with grades 3-5.

In his email to me, Andrew sent a pic of himself inserted into a Frieda Kahlo portrait and included the following text: Hahaha, your photoshop project with 6th grade is better, but this sure is fun and simple. I wonder if the producers got liscensing??

I'm hoping/assuming that the paintings included in Masterpiece Me! are all in the public domain.

I teach a Photoshop project for middle school students where I show the basics of Photoshop, but I also discuss media literacy and copyright. The past couple of years, students layered themselves into a Renaissance painting as part of an integrated study of the Renaissance in English, Social Studies, Science, Spanish, Music.

This year, we spent three days alternating between learning how to navigate Photoshop and discussing fair use, copyright, public domain, Shepard Fairey's Hope painting, and the Mona Lisa.

A brief overview of the Photoshop project is here: http://karenblumberg.com/minorpieces-of-the-renaissance

My copyright lesson is here: http://karenblumberg.com/using-the-mona-lisa-and-shepard-fairey-to-dis

A quick how-to Photoshop slide show is here: http://karenblumberg.com/these-are-the-incomplete-directions-for-my-6t