Photoshopping...

The Photoshop activity today was really interesting. There was a pretty wide range of experience levels amongst the attendees, which mirrored the kind of spread you might expect to get in a class of children. We introduced them to some fairly simple techniques within Photoshop, aiming to get across principles of layering, adjusting, cutting, pasting etc. I often find that people struggle initially to get their heads around what is actually happening with the artwork when they begin to work in an ICT realm, and ‘real life’ analogies can often be incredibly powerful as ways in to getting that conceptualisation clear in people’s minds. Organising workflow is also really valuable in my opinion, and is something that is useful to clarify. It’s particularly relevant when working on something like a laptop where desktop real estate can be severely limiting. So just as you can easily confuse yourself and find it hard to find things on your ‘real’ worktop if you don’t keep it organised, so it is in the digital realm. In fact, it’s exacerbated!

However, all the attendees worked fabulously well, and by lunch had produced some really successful and fascinating digital images.

The plan was then to print these onto iron-on transfer paper and then apply these to fabric in the afternoon session… Also, we printed them onto regular photocopy paper so that we could cut them up and weave them into carded cocoon stripping. So much to do!