Having a Sub Doesn't Have to Stink

If you were to ask me about planning for a substitute teacher early in my teaching career, I would probably groan and explain that it is often MORE work to put together sub plans than to be in the classroom. I would look at the day away and know that whatever I put together was a throw-away lesson or might end in a mess because many substitutes (no fault of their own) are not trained in the magic of Art education. 

Since the implementation of Schoology and empowering students to be their own sources of creation through choice, I am not as worried as I once was about losing a day of instruction when I happen to be out of my classroom. Using Youtube tutorials, step-by-steps, as well as giving students options, I know they will be engaged in the work when I am gone.

Since many of these students have never used Photoshop before, I decided to have their first Photoshop Challenge involve various portrait options. That way they can see the overlap between this injected activity and their current project theme. Some of them have even expressed interest in changing their media of focus since they now have an idea of what can be done when using Photoshop. 

Students uploaded their completed images to Artsonia, but here are a few highlights from what was completed with the substitute teacher yesterday:

Samantha: While creating this piece through photoshop I used many different tools. I think that the tool I used the most was the crop tool. I used this tool for every single picture to delete the white around the picture. I also used the paint bucket to create the background and I adjusted my layers by using the drag arrow tool. All of the objects shown in this creation mean something to me for example. The dog at the top represents my dog Mia that I love so so much. The disney tsum tsum's represent me because I am a Disney mega fan. I also included a picture of my favorite animal, foods, and I also included pictures of dancers, their shoes and their awards because I have been dancing since I was 3. That is what is included within my picture.

Justin: In this piece I put my favorite place to eat, my favorite sports, my favorite team, and my country. I put these items into my head because they resemble me. In the background I put dashes leading towards my face to use the rule of thirds.

Avery: What I did to create this was I opened up this picture and then I opened up iPhoto and drag and dropped the picture on a new layer and did "command t" to make it the size of the paper. I then used the overlay settings and saved it in JPEG to my desktop. I chose to do this because not only can you see things with your eye but also with all if you, it ties in with make the unseen seen because it shows that you can see things with more than just you eye.

Ella: My artwork uses different layers of pictures to create an allusion that she is in the sky, opening a keratin. I like how the certain is opening like she is looking into a new world of wonder. You can think of anything and make it look real and thats what iI did in my photoshop challenge.

Noah: This project was a little frustrating. Photoshop didn't work for a little while, and I have not really ever done Photoshop. I tried to make it look 3 dimensional by lowering the opacity of some of my pictures more than others. Due to the low opacity of the of the images, they took mostly the color of the abstract background I created.