Digital Artist and Illustrator
This has been a wonderful project where the children have explored a wide range of mediums including photography, pen line portrait illustration, textured mark making with a variety of tools, paint blending experimentation on canvas, digital illustration and layering techniques and then bringing all these things together for the final pieces. The finished artworks are absolutely fabulous and so wonderfully individual. It was a pleasure to work with such a great bunch of talented young artists.
Here are some of the images that have been created by the children at Gomersal Primary School in recent creative workshops. These will be added to the canvases that they have been working on for the last few weeks. Can’t wait to see the finished items.
I really love their use of blended digital textures incorporating their hand drawn portraits. Brilliant creativity.
This was a super day long project working with a group of talented creative children on a personal story telling project. The artwork produced was towards part of a community art exhibition with many other schools being involved. The children rolled out a large piece of paper across the school hall floor and each of them worked on multiple areas of the paper creating illustrative self portraits of themselves and embellishing the portraits with images that related to them and their lives.
Afterwards the children extensively photographed the images that they had made using ipads. That done, they further worked on their imagery digitally manipulating the images using specific apps in the ipad until they had a made a large amount of usable media. The resulting posters were the results of their hard work. A super project with a fab bunch of children.
This was a really fun and creative art club. From large A2 printed portrait photographs the children traced their own images paying particular attention to the shapes that exist within the human face. This made for some really lovely and unusual drawings. The second stage was to make another tracing, but this time from the initial line drawing so that there was some extra degradation of form though this process.
Using a limited palette of colours, the children then inked the second drawing by almost block filling the shapes that they had discovered within the lines of their drawings.
I love how these beautiful images started to appear on the paper. We later scanned the images and went on to do some digital image manipulation with them. Great fun.
DIGITAL MANIPULATION
Using Dazzle 03 pupils created funky character designs to use in the production of a Digital Urban Mural. Further graphic experimentation had them exploring various tools within the Dazzle 03 software package where they used multiple layers and learned to transfer images from one document to another. The pupils then combined many graphic elements to form the finished artwork exploring colour, texture, image placement, small graphic additions and much more. I love how busy these images are and how they have come together as a group of images.
This was a fun project with Shelly First School where the children got to make King and Queen portraits out of their own faces as part of a whole schools creative arts week. The theme for the art produced during the weeks creative activities was all based around and celebrating the fact that Queen Elizabeth II will become our longest-reigning British monarch on 9 September 2015. A massive amount of artwork was produced during the workshops and a lot of fun was had along the way. Here are a few from the pile. I think they all look positively regal.
Working with KS2 art club I did a quick photo shoot with the children during their first session to get some source material for their illustrations.
Once that was done we loaded all the images into the computer and started the creative process.
Using Dazzle 3 the children were shown how to use the different layers to derive illustrated images from the photographs. They were then encouraged to experimented with colour to create their finished portraits.
Once these initial images had been finished I wanted the children to do something different with their portrait images. We looked at further developing the children’s ability to manipulate their original images in Dazzle 3. Using different layering techniques and a bank of texture images, the children added experimental textures and
graphics to form their final piece of work, inspired by the urban graphics that are akin to my style of work. Here are some of the final images…
Wonderful work I’m sure you will agree!
A mixture of photographic and illustrated materials.
Using Dazzle 3, the children at Rowley Lane JIN School explored portrait illustration using multiple digital layers. When they had finished their main images derived from their own photo’s, they made tome funky textured canvases in which to place their illustrated selves. The workshop was a lot of fun and their finished artwork is just super. I love the expressions and colour work.
In 2013, Salendine Nook High School won the Guardian Newspaper’s ‘School We’d Like’ competition and was awarded £5000 in prize money to revamp the Blue Tunnel, which is a key linking walkway between different buildings in the school. See the initial post from The Guardian… The Guardian – Salendine Nook: graffiti art project transforms old walkway.
I was approached by the school in the summer of 2013 and was asked to facilitate a creative project consisting of a series of workshops based around the title ‘I CAN’. These workshops began in autumn term 2013 and ran through to March 2014.
The initial workshops explored the history and culture of street art and graffiti and looked at the myriad of artists whose work adorns the street of the world’s urban spaces. Particular focus was placed upon methods, techniques, colour use, image placement and characteristics concerning each individual artist’s approach and style.
We looked at everything from the huge typographic scrawls and intricate lettering styles of graffiti and the continued development and evolution of graffiti culture, to Wheat Paste posting, the Knit The City phenomenon, Banksy, The London Police, Shepard Fairey and many more.
The creative workshops were designed to produce a range of strong graphics, which were either hand drawn, painted, developed from photographic elements, made using collage techniques and indeed a mixture of all these modes. Strong emphasis was placed on different drawing techniques designed to loosen up the creative process and produce an unexpected quirkiness in the resulting graphics.
Students also explored the use of the light box to trace images in order to develop quick and strong graphic styles and to experiment with composition. There was also an emphasis on the significance of mark making, constructing textures using paint splats, printing with inked bubble wrap and other interesting found materials.
Sponged ink marks and small hand drawn elements like arrows, swirls, cross-hatching and all sorts of shapes and patterns were created in the exploratory process.
Out of the mass of graphics that were produced in the workshops, the students started to get a real and definite idea about which images they wanted to use in their final artworks.
The imagery was then scanned at high resolution and prepared for layering and colouring using Photoshop CS6. This allowed the creative process to be further investigated resulting in the impacting and beautiful graphics that were produced in the student’s final pieces.
The project was a wonderful journey of creativity from beginning to end and a lot of fun was had along the way.
I think the resulting artworks speak for themselves.
Check out the Guardian article here… The Guardian – How street art can boost learning and community engagement in schools.
This was a super project commissioned by the Guardian and funded by Zurich Municipal.
This was a lovely project at Rowley Lane. The children got to create lots of different illustrations using portrait photography as their starting point. Using textures, graphics and creative tablet apps to further manipulate the images, the year 2 – 6 children had some really brilliant ideas and moved between the creative platforms as if it were second nature.
The staff were really friendly and helpful too. I have always enjoyed working with this school.
Check out some of their artwork below.
Working as Artist in Residence with young people at Bradford Academy recently in the production of funky graphics across four large circular boards. The design challenge was based on the Academy Value Contract (AVC) that students agree to adhere to. It is always great fun working at this school. Both staff and Students are equally enthusiastic for the creative process.
All artwork has been digitally reproduced and is now displayed in the school.
Here’s a shore time laps film from the day.
What will it look like, sound like and feel like if all learners from BA work/play safe physically?
We will have the maturity to self evaluate our actions. We will not discriminate against other members of the Academy and we will be responsible for our actions emotionally and physically.
What will it look like, sound like and feel like if all learners from BA work/play fair?
We will be fair, respectful and make sure everyone is valued in the school community. We will ensure everyone is motivated and be part of a team. We will also be given opportunities and be equally supported.
What will it look like, sound like and feel like if all learners from BA work/play safe emotionally?
We will not judge others for their individuality and we will respect everyone’s opinions and thoughts by treating everyone how we would like to be treated.
What will it look like, sound like and feel like if all learners from BA work/play hard?
We will, to the best of our ability, give 100% effort with pride and enthusiasm. This will help us to find our personal balance between working, playing and relaxing in order to reach our full potential.
Emerging artwork and graphics from the ‘I Can’ blue tunnel project at Salendine Nook High School, Huddersfield. There are some fabulous images being created, both in the form of digital graphics and hand drawn illustrations. I’m working with a great set of students who are producing some outstanding artwork in this urban street art regeneration project. More to come soon…
Here is an article written by Hazel Saxelby, a teacher whom I have work closely with over the past few years at Batley Girls’ High School and Visual Arts College.
‘Graphic Artist Mike Barrett (www.emelbi.com) returned again in 2013 to support our students with their coursework and exam projects. Mike is one of our ‘family of artists’ who has worked closely with staff and students to extend their design skills and develop their use of CAD, specifically using Adobe Photoshop. As a result of him returning year on year to the school, Mike’s extensive expertise is being embedded, in his absence, into our day to day teaching and we are finding that these skills can be passed on to students even more effectively.
Last year, he worked with both key stage 4 & 5 Art Graphics students. The GCSE students benefitted from Mike’s creativity and support as they tackled the controlled assessment exam. Each of the students approached the unit in their own way and developed exciting, personal ideas with professional results. Some students innovatively used new media and
technology, such as smartphones and Instagram to capture and begin developing their own imagery.’
Read the rest of the article here… http://www.batleygirls.co.uk/3036-2/
I have recently been working with the Pupil Referral Unit at Bradley, Huddersfield, delivering a series of digital illustration workshops using photographic manipulation and computer aided illustrative techniques. The children created some brilliant images. Here are some of the portrait illustrations from the workshops. Some lovely work and some great expressions!
As part of North Huddersfield Community Arts Week I ran a series of mini workshops today working with young people from Ashbrow School and Birkby Junior School.
The workshop was based on creating digital graphics that would work well on skateboard decks. Mostly working in pairs, the pupils only had about 20 minutes to create these wonderful images.
They listened well, worked extremely diligently and had a lot of fun in the process. I was super impressed with the images that they produced. Awesome stuff!
Birkby Junior School Images
Carolanne and Ushna
Kian and Nabil
Ali and Reggie
Zahra and Raheel
Iqra and Allysia
Esha
Atika and Sadia
Faiza and Bilal
Ismaeal
Muskan and Calvin
Ibraheem and Asad
Birkby Decks
Ashbrow School Images
Amber
Grace and Burhan
Zain and Jake
Jujhar and Troy
Kieren
Ellie-rose and Tayba
Pharrell and Armin
Ashbrow Deck
A group of Gomersal Primary School pupils from years 3, 4 and 5 have just completed a workshop creating digital self portrait illustrations with some very striking results.
Based on photographic images of themselves, the pupils skilfully created these digital illustrations using a series of layers and other digital tools.
An alternative colour pallet was also explored for some of the digital colouring, which made for some very interesting imagery indeed. Further layering techniques were also looked at with the introduction of textures and various other incidents and elements adding further depth to their images. Here are the brilliant illustrations that they created.
Digital Illustration Portraits
Further Image Manipulation
