2nd session of Fall 2010

Today the Badgers are at home playing against Austin Peay and the day is traditional feeling like a fall football day. The tail gaters are cooking up some breakfast outside with their grills. For the student’s 2nd session of the fall they received a Photoshop breakfast from Chris. Chris starts out with Lit Wayne image from last class session and they added a tattoo to Lit Wayne’s body and finished up removing the tats he already has. Then Chris topped off the Photoshop eggs with a photography equivalent lesson so that the students know they have some control over the outcome of an image before a picture is taken by a camera. The student’s coffee was the sweet smell of a quick quiz which they performed well in. The toast of the day was their posting of the image they modified and the original image with a few comments. Their bacon was the idea of taking pictures using their own digital camera. My omelet will be seeing the images they produce through their camera to see what they see.

Ai II: A Colorful Day in Illustrator

The day started off with a foot in color theory... which most of the students already had previous knowledge about. As the class went through The Basics of Color Theory slides, it was pointed out that the "complementary" colors mean they are compatible with each other, like green and red whereas "complimentary" colors mean... you're liking something, and that something is... color? -- Just a little spell check in case the students decide to use this in their blog today ;)

Anyways, to get back to the main lesson in class, the color theory went -for the most part- pretty okay. The students were lost when it was time to talk about RGB -- which isn't exactly the primary colors that we had told them just earlier in the slide -- RYB. But with physics, light's primary colors and CYMK were explained... but left the students a little confused. But rest assure! Chou informed the students that "it will get easier as we keep doing this" which led to the next portion of the day: Spiderman! Nah, it's live paint and live trace =)

As Chou began his lesson plan, he explained the difference between rastor and vector images... Which led to Chou bringing an image into Illustrator to live trace it (bitmaps into vectors) and taking it back old school, Chou explained how live paint is just like the programs that they used in elementary school...

After Live Trace and Paint was over and done with, Chou grabbed the pen tool and started tracing... which looked pretty easy, but from my experience, it's not! Nevertheless, now the students know how to bring bitmaps into Illustrator and vectorize it! And if not vectorization... They now know how to manually trace things.

After the lecture, the students were let loose to trace and paint their own cartoon images.

But... wait! What about colored bitmaps?!
Rest assure, tracing options are now explained: Simple trace is just for black and white. Color 6 limits the number of colors Illustrator can produce when "tracing."

Ok. Now back to the student's projects.

As the students spent time on their seasons, they focused on the background a lot more so than the last year's group did. The quickness of finding the symbols and making backgrounds seemed to be easier for the students now. No one had questions about how to add symbols and live trace and paint came easy for them so everything seems to be on the right path!

The rest of the class consisted of the students saved their work, discovered the wall, did their own thing, and headed out to lunch.

First of class Fall of 2010

During the time America was remembering the 9/11 attack on the twin towers the day was a little wet in Madison but the students attending their first ITA fall class seemed be excited. After AJ’s introduction of their schedule for the fall and spring the student were divided into lab or homeroom.

Chris led the freshmen pack into the world of Photoshop by giving them a quick review from summer camp’s Photoshop class. To start the class off they were questioned about what they knew about Photoshop and if any of them used Photoshop since the summer. It was nice to see many of class were making use of their new knowledge in Photoshop outside of class. Also, I notice the lack of assistance needed by the majority of students and I think I can hazard a guess that they remembered or used it quite bit from the summer camp.

The surprise of the day was when the freshmen received their printers during class but the bigger surprise came to them when they realized they had to haul it all day. Poor thangs, but it seem to only fuel their excitement about ITA and enforced the program’s seriousness about their success in education.