Fantasy Landscapes Using Photoshop- by Anjum Razaq

Creating fantasy artwork requires a lot of imagination as well as expertise in softwares which are used to create such amazing pictures. Anything is possible; whether it’s a demons lair, a floating castle in the sky or even an old witch in the woods. However to know how to use the software well enough in order to achieve these images is daunting and very little software is as daunting as Adobe Photoshop. Having been the industry standard for over 25 years being an expert in Photoshop takes a lot of practice and time, but I wanted to be able to use it to a good standard to teach it to my pupils. I used a variety of video tutorials and written guides I found online and practiced for a few hours over the summer until I felt I was confident enough to teach the children, this with no prior experience with the software at all.

As teachers we want our children to be creative and imaginative individuals. We use a variety of ways to encourage our pupil’s artistic side including images, books and music. However often the children will think of common ideas they have read in books, seen in films or even played on computer games. In those media the characters may be well rounded and have personality but often the children will insert a character they know and assume you will know their back-story and history through a process of osmosis. I’m sure we have all been there, marking a writing assessment when a famous character pops up- be it James Bond, Harry Potter or Master Chief! The name drop aside many of the characters in the children’s stories are one dimensional ciphers with very little personality or characterisation.

I thought that if the children could create an image of their story world using high end tools it would encourage them to make a more consistent, deeper and richer world. In year 7 none of the children had used Photoshop at all. I introduced the children to the basics of Photoshop using the Influence Map lesson plans I created for year 8. The children were then asked to find a wide variety of images they wanted to use for their fantasy landscape and use the tools taught to them to create a fantasy setting. I taught some of the more complex tools including layer masks, opacity, colours, curves and filters. This is the result after 6 sessions with Photoshop and I think you’ll agree that the work produced is very impressive.

Pixel Art in Illustrator- by Anjum Razaq

To people of a certain age the high point of pixel art was the 80’s and 90’s. Pixel art was brought to the mainstream with the release of game consoles in the early eighties and reached it’s zenith in the 90’s. These decades saw the rise of computer games, but as the years went by and the computers became more powerful pixel art became replaced with more polished and smoother graphics and textures. However in recent years there has been a renaissance in pixel art, fuelled in part by retro geek-chic but also by smart phones and other digital devices that allow classic games from bygone eras to be played on the go. Pixel is back baby!

Those 8-bit and 16-bit graphics we all loved back then often evoke feelings of nostalgia and take us back in time. Nostalgia aside, pixel art is a wonderful art form in its own right and many of us have come to love it. With so few pixels to work with pixel artist’s had to make each one count and count they did, there are many iconic images that are seared into gamers consciousness. The recent rise in the indie game scene has seen many new studios and indie developers using the pixel art style to create their games as it compliment their work and makes game production more accessible and financially viable. To this end I created a series of lessons where the children had to produce graphic illustrations using pixel art as their inspiration. When creating the lessons I was pleasantly surprised by how many of the children could identify the various old-school pixel art computer characters, the children easily identified such icons as Mario, Pacman and Sonic but the more obscure icons such as Samus Aran and Donkey Kong were quickly recognised too. Pixel art will feature heavily in our game creating sequence of lesson plans later in the school year but for the meantime here are some examples of the work the children did.

Influence Maps- by Anjum Razaq

I am a huge fan of Deviantart and came across the meme called the Influence Map, where you fill in various sized squares on a gridded template with various things that influence you as a person. You can literally put anything in these squares-- photos of locations or people, artist's work, computer games, TV shows, music, movies and books. You name it, you can put it in there. Fill the grid by placing more prominent influences as larger images. These are all personal and not all the choices are obvious, but I did limit the children to just one computer game and one cartoon otherwise you don’t get a nice mix of influences.. It is a fun activity and great as an introduction to Photoshop. I used this to teach myself some of the Photoshop basic and once confident I did it as a lesson with the children. For those people who do not have Photoshop there is a freeware available that does the same job called gimp, download and enjoy!

Here are a few examples of the work I and the children did: