Photography Workshops

Birkby Junior School – Beautiful Mundane Project – Y4 Digital Graphics and Photography Workshop with EMELBI – 2023

19th May 2023 By EMELBI

The Beautiful Mundane Project – Making Graphics from Simple Digital Photography

Working with the year 4 pupils at Birkby Junior School we looked at taking photographs of really mundane subject matter in order to make some striking graphics.

Using the Snapseed app on the iPad, the pupils manipulated their own photographic images, taking them through a series of treatments in order to enhance the imagery and create a set of striking graphics from simple beginnings.

Here are a sample of the fabulous images that they created during the workshops.

Birkby Junior School – Y4 Digital Graphics and Photography Workshop with EMELBI

24th January 2023 By EMELBI

Making digital graphics from simple digital photographs with Year 4 at Birkby Junior School.

This workshop was all about making striking digital graphics from a really basic set of digital photographs. Using iPads, the children were encouraged to take a series of photographs of every-day, mundane objects. Objects that would usually seem humdrum and perhaps largely taken for granted, like sinks, radiators, window cills, light switches, air vents, skirting boards etc.

Using the apps Pixlr and Snapseed on the iPad, the children manipulated the images, taking them through a series of treatments in order to enhance the imagery and create a set of striking graphics from those mundane beginnings.

Here are a sample of the fabulous images that they created during the workshops.

The Beautiful Mundane Project – Birkby Junior School

19th May 2021 By EMELBI

This was such a fun project with years 4 and 5 at Birkby Junior School. All the children were introduced to the process of making striking digital graphics from really basic digital photography.

STAGE ONE – THE PHOTOGRAPHY

Using iPads, the children were encouraged to take a series of photographs of every-day, mundane objects that would usually seem humdrum or of a dull subject matter. Things like light switches, radiators, air vents, skirting boards etc.

STAGE TWO – THE IMAGE TREATMENT

Using various apps on the iPad, the children then took the images through a series of treatments in order to enhance the imagery to make it a little less dull, introducing textures, colour overlays and light leaks to name but a few.

STAGE THREE – THE TEXT LAYOUT and GRAPHIC DESIGN

The children were then asked to produce a poster for a mock local event using one of the images that they had made as the background. They were given the choice of either:

1. A Music Festival

2. A Technology Convention (Tech Con)

3. A Horticultural Show (Flower Show)

4. An Art Exhibition

Using the same apps that they had used in the creation of their graphics; but this time using a different set of tools within those apps, the children created some wonderful work based on these mock events.

The graphics that they produced and the subsequent posters are full of colour and energy. They have vibrancy, great structure and beautiful detail. The whole workshop was to show that you can create beautiful graphics from bland imagery with a bit of imagination and technical know-how. The workshops were a great success and the children really enjoyed that whole process.

Best comment: “I didn’t know that you could create amazing things from nothing!”

IMAGE MANIPULATION DAY

GRAPHIC DESIGN DAY

Gomersal Primary School – Experimental Portrait Workshop

10th December 2015 By EMELBI Leave a Comment

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.

Line and Ink Work

DIGITAL MANIPULATION

WORKSHOP PHOTOS

Gomersal Primary School – Digital Portrait and Digital Urban Graphics Workshop

10th May 2015 By EMELBI Leave a Comment

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!

Digital Urban Graphics

A mixture of photographic and illustrated materials.

Rowley Lane JIN School : Digital Urban Illustration Workshop

15th March 2015 By EMELBI Leave a Comment

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.

Salendine Nook High School – ‘I CAN’ Street Graphics Project.

7th August 2014 By EMELBI Leave a Comment

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.

Rowley Lane JIN School : Drawing – Digital Illustration – Image Manipulation – App Creativity

20th June 2014 By EMELBI Leave a Comment

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.

Gomersal Primary School – School Banner Project

20th July 2012 By EMELBI Leave a Comment

This project formed part of the celebration of Gomersal Primary Schools 100th year anniversary and also the pending move of the primary school up to the site of the middle school.

This was a brilliant project that involved the entire school. Over the course of two days, every child from every class from each and every year group was armed with a digital camera. With cameras in hand they were then asked to take photographs of the exterior buildings of both Gomersal Primary and Gomersal Middle School, paying specific consideration to aspects of structure, colour and building materials. Thanks to the efforts of the staff this logistical challenge during such tight time constraints went like clockwork. Not only that, it was a massive amount of fun. The children managed to take a whooping 4138 photographs.

There were then a series of workshops where the children came and discussed the photography and took part in the digital manipulation of the photographic imagery that they had produced. During this time their own ideas, personal stories about the school and the graphics that they created formed the idea for the banner graphic.

The ideas that solidified were:

Energy bursting out of the school
Something fun because school is fun.
Robot characters that represent the children.
Making building out of photographs.
Images that look busy.
A collage of the school made entirely from photographs.

Banner Detail #1

Banner Detail #2

Banner Detail #3

Banner Detail #4

Banner Detail #5

Photo Robot #1

Photo Robot #2

Photo Robot #3

Photo Robot #4

Photo Robot #5

Photo Robot #6

Photo Robot #7

Photo Robot #8

Photo Robot #9

Photo Robot #10

Photo Robot #11

The banner is now on permanent display in the entrance foyer of the school.

Birkby Infants & Nursery School – Alcoves

19th July 2012 By EMELBI Leave a Comment

This was a fabulous project to produce two large graphics that would form a permanent display within the school that celebrated the local community.

Firstly I spent a day with two large groups of children and parents photographing the local area and all the places that hold significance for the local community.

Thereafter, the children and their parents took part in a series of workshops exploring digital illustration and design techniques using simple design software. During these workshops they deconstructed the photographic imagery that they had produced and from these elements made a series of fantastic digital graphics.

The photos and graphics that were generated during the project made up an integral part of the final design outcome and were used to create two large images to accommodate two separate alcoves, which are now on permanent display in the school entrance hall.

A fabulous project! A lot of fun was had indeed.