The project

We looked at the cut and paste and Sean Hillen websites as a reference point for the start of the project. The idea was to use the daily newspapers as a starting point for creating a piece of photo-montage work using digital photos. These digital photos could be from the newspapers themselves (taking a digi photo of the page is quicker than scanning and keeps all your source images at the same resolution / size) or from the immediate environment (classroom / school grounds).

Eventually the artwork produced would be output onto Lazertran decal sheets and applied to a range of surfaces, including boards coated in Smooth-It, a relatively new product made by Artex.

Working in Photoshop

We downloaded all the photos on one laptop and then stored those on the server so that all participants could access all the resources. In a classroom situation this has implications for who is responsible for organising this. Maybe it’s the teacher? Maybe it’s a student? Maybe you are lucky and have a technician to help them along!?

We then started opening the photos in Photoshop, and began to cut out parts to compose onto an A3 document. There were issues about resolutions for theses final A3 pieces of work. Should we use 300dpi? 150? Or stick to 72? All of these resolutions have pros and cons. Personally I tend to use 150 as a compromise between preparing for print and for screen publication. Larger resolutions put more demands on your computer resources and can make for huge files in Photoshop. These issues will be exacerbated on older machines. In my experience the ‘older machines’ issue seems to be afflict Windows more than Mac machines. Newer versions of OS X seem happier working on older Macs than new versions of Windows does with older PCs. I expect Vista will make A LOT of demands on hardware in comparison to OS X 10.5.

We had a quick tutorial with Photoshop, looking at using the lasso tools to copy and paste into new layers on the A3 document. We all had a lot of fun getting the hang of the magnetic lasso tool in particular! It’s a tricky beast to be sure. Tony gave us all the handy tip of using the backspace key to undo the last selection point. Top Tip!