Tricia Fuglestad's Blog

The Educational Implications of Godzilla

5/11/2019

I was asked to contribute to a scholarly text on digital technologies in my elementary art room. (View the textbook on Amazon) I contributed chapter 4 which I titled, The Educational Implications of Godzilla, Ghosts, and Aliens. In this chapter I tell the story of how iPads transformed our art room in rich and exciting ways. Our transdigital experiences (physical art making with digital art extensions) has expanded our curriculum, engaged learners in dynamic media, and amplified their voice to authentic audiences. I began the chapter telling the story of my technology integration journey and move through how projects (like those using Godzilla, ghosts, and Aliens) opened new doors to learning for my students.

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UV Cityscapes in One-Point Perspective

4/1/2019

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5th graders learned how to draw a city scene with one-point perspective. This meant that they created a vanishing point with converging lines. They learned to use their ruler to draw every line towards the vanishing point for the side of the buildings facing the street. We spent a long time exploring this concept, drawing, revising, and enhancing our work.

UPDATE: I Finally Packaged this lesson!

Download a very detailed packaged lesson to make this project with your students

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Playing with Relative Size

9/14/2017

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Relative Size refers to clues in the picture that help you figure out the size of objects.

Playing with relative size forces the viewer to imagine something much bigger or much smaller than seemingly possible.
Below is a drawing of a fireplace mantel. It has a candle and picture frames. You would imagine that the objects are only about 8"-12" high. Now when you place a human on the mantel that confuses the scene. Either the mantel is much bigger than you thought or the human is a small as a mouse.

Below is a drawing of a building in Arlington Heights. You can tell from the size of the sidewalk and umbrella tables compared to the building that it's probably over 10 stories tall. Now when we add a human into the picture as tall as the building it makes you wonder if the building is much smaller or the human is monstrously big.

Can you tell in this animation that something extra had to happen to make it convincing that the human was interacting with the building? I'll explain below.

How did you do that?

The green screen app by Do Ink allows you to layer video over or under an image. You can record in real time using the camera mode or do what I did above. I recorded the student in front of green screen first which allowed them to crop, resize, and find the best placement over their drawing to create the illusion that they are as small as a mouse according to relative size.

To make it look like the human can stand behind the building and in front of the sky we had to import the scene twice. You'll see on my screenshot above that I sandwiched the green screen footage between duplicate images. Then, I erased the background from the top image using the masking tools in the app. Here is what it might have looked like if you were just viewing it alone. I can do this trick in the superimpose app as well and then import it, but it's not necessary since the Green Screen app has all the tools for erasing too.

Tutorial for Relative Size in Green Screen App by Do Ink from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Playing with relative size resources:

Take a look at this commercial. It's fun to see the inflatable gorilla set loose in the city. Does it's size seem to change when you compare it to the relative size of the objects around it?

This clip from the Disney adaptation of the book, BFG (Big Friendly Giant) makes everyone feel as small as a mouse when you see the world from the point of view of BFG.

A group of 4th graders used their profile drawings and green screen videos of 1st graders to play with relative size. We called this movie, Little Buddies. See this post for more info.

Another way to demonstrate that students understand relative size is using animation to show size change from foreground (bigger) to background (smaller) along with the other aspects of creating the illusion of depth. See this lesson for more info.

Work on estimation by looking at relative size to build number sense.

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Super iPad Workshop in Portage, IN

9/1/2013

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I met an amazing team of art teachers on Saturday in Portage, Indiana. They gave up a day of their holiday weekend to work on some teaching ideas and strategies for incorporating their class set of iPads into their art programs. Learn more about their iPad initiative during their NAEA conference presentation this Spring.

We practiced a wide range of techniques and art lessons that were open ended enough that teachers could modify them into the format that best supports the learning objectives needed in their curriculum. This collage to the right is from a Pass the Portrait game/activity where students use my portrait template to begin drawing the features of the face in a layer over it. Then they pass their iPad to the next person who then continues the drawing. This can be modified in many ways. Perhaps each student is given a style of art or portraits made from different artists to reference for their contribution to each portrait that is passed their way. This lesson demonstrates how to share a template, draw in layers, and create a collaborative piece, use sketchbook express, and turn in the artwork via email.

We experimented with the iMotionHD app to create this silly stop-motion animation. Our inspiration for this video came from OK Go's primary color video for Sesame Street. I created a safeshare link here. I turned it into this gif using the 5seconds app.

We also tried our hand at rotoscope animation. We each created one frame in this tiny animation of 13 frames. I shared out the images from my dropbox. Each teacher pulled it into SketchbookX and drew a contour line drawing. Then emailed the results with the image number as the subject. I combined the images quickly using Gifninja. See it here.

We played around with the Artstudio app's magic wand to create a transparent png to layer with my Newsweek template and text. This lesson can be used across the curriculum. See all my template, handout, examples, and Newsweek resources here.

We used Sketchbook X to create a photo collage where students would begin with their own "selfie" and layer on their classmates' features digitally. I saw this idea first from art teacher, Ms. Oliveri. Here is her post.

We also explored the many possibilities of DOINK including my transparency lesson (see Really Spooky Landscapes) and my perspective lesson (see Godzilla's perspective.
I wrote a grant to receive an all-school purchase of the DOINK iPad app and a class set of styluses. View my grant here. We only spent a few seconds trying out the Crown fountain interactive public art lesson with color lake effect. So much to explore and not enough time. I guess one day wasn't enough:)
Use my Creating on iPads page to keep exploring anytime!

@fuglefun My mom attended your workshop today and had nothing but great things to say!! You were opening her eyes to a whole new world!
— Katie Hurckes (@khurckes) September 1, 2013

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Godzilla's Perspective

7/27/2013

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Why not use Godzilla as a tool for teaching perspective to your students on iPads?

Objective:
One-point perspective of a cityscape using converging lines and a vanishing point with an animation of diminishing sizes to demonstrate depth.
<---See my example

Use layers in Sketchbook Express to create background, buildings, and converging lines for perspective that you can delete later. Click the image to view it larger.

Use Doink animation app to draw a dinosaur-lizard-godzilla-ish creature. Duplicate the frame and make some changes to create an animation.

Using Doink's composition mode bring in both images. Make your creature large in the foreground. Click to view larger.

Create a path towards the vanishing point and resize the creature to make it diminish in size. Click to view larger.

Four resources for teaching this lesson:

The Case of the Vanishing Point a step by step drawing powerpoint. Download from TpT

Bye Bye Road, music video that introduces the concepts found in this perspective lesson. Download from TpT

Here is my How to draw a T-Rex Dinosaur step by step powerpoint. Download from TpT.

Godzilla Educational Movie from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Came across this article encouraging teachers to teach spatial concepts to children to help them succeed in math and science.

Also, my husband shared this Godzilla song with me from the Blue Osyter Cult. Every art project should have a theme song. Here it is.

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Shadow Art

5/2/2013

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One group of fifth grade students was back from their field trip in time for art class. So we decided to try something new, Shadow Art, with just that group to see how it would work.
For the past few weeks 5th graders had been working on their flying animations by creating the figure, landscape, and then animating both together on the computer. View them here. So we projected their landscapes digitally on the board and took out our toy dinosaurs. What? Doesn't every art room have a stash of toy dinosaurs? We created a shadow by holding it in front of the projector and snapped a photo.

We projected the digital versions of our landscapes on our board

Students chose their favorite dinosaur toy to create a shadow

The snapshot of the board was enhanced with filters to look old fashioned

View the rest of these images in our gallery on Artsonia here.

Lesson idea from The Art of ED
View it here.

We watched a Godzilla Educational Movie to prepare us for this activity. Watch it here or below.

This isn't the first time Dryden students worked with shadows.
We made an entire Fugleflick in shadows called, "Show of Hands".
View this amazing video here.