Creating Avatars for a Competition
The Benefits of Competing In A Computer Art Challenge
This competition run by The Learning Place seems to be designed by educators for educators and their classes.
The prize directly reinforces the behaviour that won the prize. So it is a self reinforcing learning loop in action. To be taught by someone as skillful, imagination and funny as Gary Clark creator of Swamp it an exciting incentive for the students.
The benefits of participating in this style of competition are outlined below.
The students will learn important drawing and computer art skills
Some of these are
- The importance of gesture drawing. Being able to think in drawing, quickly and spontaneously is an essential skill for serious artists. Cartooning in particular requires the artist quickly sketch a host of approaches and poses of characters before settling on the final idea for a comic strip.
- Quality of Outlining. Students who would like to work on their artwork in programmes such as Photoshop must become acutely aware of the outlines they use and their quality. They need to make sure there are no gaps for colours to leak through. It is advantageous for students to practice maintaining expressive lines even when rescuing them in later stages of drawing.
- Colour and it’s relation to emotion. Students can greatly enhance the statement they are making id they think about and research the emotional qualities of colour.
- Simplicity of design. Avatars are traditionally around 100*100pointsThe design is usually more effective if there is simplicity and dramatic statement.
When students are working out their designs they can learn about the depiction of emotions by
- Mime and acting them out.
- Playing freeze frames
- Doing gesture drawings in their Creative Arts Journals
- Talk about them…”I look like this when I feel”
- Play guessing games around them eg Draw a feeling and see if the class can guess what it is
- Read an article about emotions in the Visual Arts
When students are working on their drawings in a computer programme they will learn about
- Cleaning images and working with enhancements
- Computerised colouring and working with filtered effects
- Special filtered effects and layers
- Sizing and resizing images both canvas and image size
- Saving work and filing correctly
- Uploading into competition area and filling out interactive forms
By becoming involved in an online competition the students get to see what others are doing and the different way they approach similar projects
Learn about
- time management and deadlines
- competition compliance
- online learning communities and how they function
Teachers
- Learn about The Learning Place and all it has to offer
- Gain an understanding of how cartooning can be used in the classroom
Both teachers and students get to meet Gary Clark and experience a workshop hosted by the famous comic strip cartoonist.
