Digital art Big Draw workshop at the Electric Theatre, Guildford.
Tags: photoshop, Brushes, iPad, sketchbook, Guildford, Electric Theatre, Surface, Tesco Hudl, Adobe Photoshop Touch, Adobe Photoshop, photo warp
Date: 30 October 2014 09:32:30
As if often the case in a half term The Electric Theatre in Guildford asked me to run a couple of art sessions for 5-9 year olds. Mondays theme was traditional art and Wednesday was digital.
We started, as almost all of my classes do, with a couple of psychological tricks to explain how easy drawing is. Once that barrier is broken (about 10 minutes in if I'm taking the scenic route) we started to draw on tablet.
And excellent fun it was too, as these sessions often tend to be :)
On the touch screens we started with the very lovely Tesco Hudl (first generation) and used Autodesk Sketchbook to take photos of drawn owls and colour them:
Then we did a little bit of face liquifying (still on Hudl) which went down brilliantly :)
We did a bit of Autostitch panorama photo taking:
(click on the photos for larger versions)
...and we drew on a range of apps:
Fresh Paint app on Surface RT.
Brushes app (v2) on iPad.
Autodesk Sketchbook on Hudl.
Adobe Photoshop on Hudl.
ArtRage on iPad.
All in all? A lot of fun and, I think, a good few new 6 year old touch screen artists ready to carry on where they left off after the 2 hour session (all asked which apps and styli they should buy and all of the parents/grandparents looked relieved when I told them that the prices were generally low and affordable). The feedback was excellent with the often asked question 'are you going to do more of these sessions' becoming more and more pressing on my mind :) Hopefully soon (although not until early 2015 that said).
I was also lucky enough to be joined by three of my College students - all very capable tablet art tutors in their own right - which meant that if I'd so wanted I could have delegated all of the work to them! I didn't of course - doing youth arts work is too much fun to not be involved in - but it was lovely to know that I could hand off to them when I wanted the younger kids to have some extra assistance...
Next up? Half a days rest. I think I've earned it :)