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New Multimedia Collage Elective Teaches Middle Schoolers a New Way of Expressing Ideas

A new elective this year—multimedia and collage—is teaching middle school students a new way of expressing their ideas. Taught by David Starfas, the class began with students learning about traditional collage techniques before moving into digital collage techniques. “The magic with collage is when we use our imagination to make something new out of the old,” says Mr. Starfas. The students' task for the semester was to create a collage image of an animal wearing clothing. “To do this, students started by drawing the elements of a background and scanning those elements onto the computer,” explains Mr. Starfas. In Photoshop they manipulated those elements to create their background, and then created an animal wearing clothing to use as a reference for their painting. When they finished painting their animal, they scanned it into Photoshop and laid it on top of their background. “The goal of this exercise was to build an understanding of technique, using traditional techniques and then moving to the computer to learn the digital shorthand of the same techniques.”
 
Students have learned a number of Photoshop skills in this class, including, but not limited to, how to transform image size and shape; how to create seamless patterns; how to adjust layers and layer style, how to manipulate and enhance color, and the importance of image size DPI. MORE PHOTOS
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