Digital

I am a bit too old to be one of those tech-savvy college graduates, who couldn’t imagine being 20 feet away from an electronic device for more than 10 minutes. I literately had a word processor in my dorm room and had to go several buildings away to access a computer, which did little more than email at that point. In fact, I only had to take one little credit in digital art to graduate from college–and I’m pretty sure we used the very first version of Photoshop in that class. Lucky for me, my first teaching job came with a laptop. I quickly became self-taught and learned to love using technology when teaching, but even more so in art making. Read below for the history of my digital art experience.

Early Work (2000-2004)

I began with a basic digital edition software that came standard on most PC’s as part of Windows. The program allowed me to cut out pieces of images and move them around in a composition. I could also distort the images, change their colors, and apply filters. This program was like Photoshop for amateurs.

Some of my first pieces from that time period were random collages of whatever digital images I had on hand. This one intermixes works of art from some of my elementary school art students, photographs of my relatives and friends, and animals from a trip to the Buffalo zoo. The limo’s headlights were created out of  a Kandinsky-inspired piece I had my kindergarten artist’s working on. These were fun to put together and have a bit of a “Where’s Waldo” effect, in that you can keep finding random things sprinkled throughout the work.



I was having so much fun with digital collage, my husband and I decided to use it for our wedding invitations. Our ceremony was small and the reception was backyard bar-b-Que style, so our invitations could be less formal than most. The background photograph was from one of our trips to New York City and the bridge served as a nice frame for us. We had them printed as postcards and received many compliments on our originality.

This collage is compiled of bits and pieces from a week long vacation on Cayuga Lake, just outside Ithaca, NY. Several of our friends rented a lake front property and throughout the week we boated, celebrated a birthday, watched our dog bite the waves, and even howled at the full moon. It was created during my experimental stages of photo-manipulation, and if I were to do it again, I would probably look to Richard Hamilton or Romare Bearden for inspiration.

Digital collage making was becoming addicting. I used it to make a sign for my classroom door, make many fun invitations to special events, and eventually transferred my skills into Photoshop (lower on this page).

Expanding beyond Digital Collage-Making (2004-2010)

Drawing in Power Point

  The cutting up and manipulation of existing photos was fun, but a bit to advanced for most of my young students. Playing with what was available on the school computers (and most home computers), I discovered Power Point could be used as a sketchbook. It’s drawing tools and multiple slides really allows an artist to build up an object out of many different shapes, then select them all, group them, and duplicate them. Once I had drawn one row of windows, it was easy to duplicate the row, change the colors and re-size them, making this cityscape come together rather quickly. Making the taxi cab on a different slide allowed me to select all the shapes at once, group them, and then copy and paste over the building. But best of all, this was software a second grade student could work with. I developed a unit in the school’s computer lab in which second grade students were drawing castles within a landscape. I even went on and illustrated an entire children’s book just using Power Point.



 

Discovering Photoshop (2008-present)

I fell back into digital collage-making as a method for teaching myself how to use the tools in Photoshop.