Arts: Visual

Flea – Jumping power of the Flea

Gordon Worley — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:14:17 +0000

Water Flea clip art

When creating videos, clipart images can be incorporated to help tell the story. In this video about Fleas, http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201102182, by Malcolm and Greg Sutton you can see the use of clipart. If you are interested in fleas here is a link to some fleas from FCIT: http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/mysearch.php?searchWords=flea&mySubmit=Search. The ETC clipart site has many types of bugs for your projects. There are over 1100 bugs, take a look http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/mysearch.php?searchWords=bugs&mySubmit=Search.

Portraits: More then head and shoulders

Gordon Worley — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:34:45 +0000

Portraits are often thought of as being photographs, paintings, drawings, or engravings of a person often depicted by showing their head and shoulders. In school this is how we usually think about the term portrait especially when the photographer comes to capture everyone’s image for the yearbook. In literature words are used to describe a person thus creating a portrait through language. Verizon Thinkfinity’s project Who Am I? A History Mystery (http://americanhistory.si.edu/militaryhistory/resources/whoami/whoami.html) helps students to learn about people in history by using words and images as clues. Give the web site a try and see if you can decode the clues and figure out who the famous person is.

If you enjoyed this activity try making your own “Who Am I?” history project using portraits from the ETC clip art collection, http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/index.htm . In the Famous People section, http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/sitemap/famous_people.php there are images of famous individuals, select an individual and download their image. Click on the thumbnail image of the person and you will be presented with four different size copies of the selected image. Select the size that best fits your intended use and download it. Research the person using various resources and create your own set of clues.

Look at the portrait you selected from the ETC clip art collection and create your own artwork of it or use the downloaded image as your starting point. The ETC clip art images are copyright friendly, you can use them in projects. Now create a collage by adding other items and words that will help us learn about the person you are creating a portrait of.

Animating Inanimate Objects

Gordon Worley — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:52:44 +0000

Ever try to make a statue talk?

Statue of Washingto

In this tutorial you will learn to use Photoshop CS5′s Puppet Warp tool to animate the mouth of a statue and save the resulting images to build a movie that simulates an animated talking mouth.

Select and save an image of a statue from ClipPix, http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/. For an picture of a president click on the American History & Government collection.
Select President’s of the United States and locate a statue of a president.
Right click on the image and save the image to your computer.
Open the image in Photoshop CS5.
Open the Layer panel from the Windows menu if it is not already open.
Multiple layers of Washington's Statue for editing.
Right click on the background layer and select duplicate or press Command + J (Control + J on a Windows computer) to duplicate the layer.
Make four or five duplicates of the layer.
Layers can be shown or hidden by clicking the eye icon in front of each layer.
Select the top lay, it should be highlighted in yellow.
From the Edit menu select Puppet Warp.
If the image has a mesh over it take the check mark out of the Show Mesh option in the Puppet Warp option panel.
Use the Puppet Warp curser so set points around the mouth. Place one point on the left corner of the mouth, two points on the top lip, another point on the right corner of the mouth, and two more points along the bottom lip.
Puppet Warp points placed on Washington's face.
If the points are moved at this time the full image will move, to hold the rest of the image still place additional points along the jaw line up under the eyes on the checks, and on the tip of the nose. Watch that the overall image does not move around, if it does then the image will look jumpy when it is added to a movie to make the animation.
Move each mouth point slightly and observe the effect it has on the mouth and total facial expression.
Try making the lips pucker, open, frown, and smile.
Puppet Warp tool used to make Washington smile.
Look at yourself in a mirror and notice how your mouth changes when you say different words and letters.
After adjusting the image click the √ (check) in the Puppet Warp options panel to set your image with the adjustments.
Click on the eye icon for the layer you are working on to turn it off and select the next layer in the layers panel. Remember, if you select a layer to work on yet have the eye on for a layer above your working layer you will not be able to see the adjustments you are performing.
Make adjustments to the second layer using the same techniques you did with the first layer.
Continue this process for all layers.
Save the layers as JPEG images. This can be done by turning one layer on at a time and selecting Save Image As.
For a quicker method for saving the images select File > Scripts > Export Layers to Files.
Export layers as JPEG images.
In the Export Layers to Files dialogue box select a location for the saved images, provide a name, select JPEG as the file type, and make any other adjustments you deem necessary. Then click Run.
Each layer will be saved as a JPEG image.
Open MovieMaker, iMovie, or any other movie program and import the still images.
Drop the images into the time-line and set their duration to .2 seconds. You can use the same image more than once and you may need to adjust the exact time depending on the audio you plan to use.
As the audio dialogue plays the images will change making the appearance of the statue talking.

Presidents Day

Gordon Worley — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:53:40 +0000

James K. Polk, eleventh president of the United States, known for his expansionist policies....

Ever wonder what Martin Van Buren or James Knox Polk looked like? How about other presidents? For your next project FCIT has clipart illustrations of the presidents for student use, http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/galleries/people/presidents.php. To learn more about U.S. presidents and their contributions to the U.S. visit Verizon Thinkfinity.

Musical Instrument Museum

Gordon Worley — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 14:59:48 +0000

This morning on NPR radio http://tinyurl.com/2c5ljlf there was a story about the Musical Instrument Museum http://www.themim.org/ located in Phoenix, AZ. The Musical Instrument Museum houses musical instruments from around the world. A tour of the museum allows visitors to view and hear instruments. After listening to the NPR story I desired to see some of the instruments to appreciate their design and craftsmanship. Upon visiting the web site for MIM I was disappointed to find they do not have images of the instruments posted. Desiring to see images of different kinds of musical instruments I visited the FCIT web site http://fcit.usf.edu/ and searched for musical instruments, here is a link to my search results http://tinyurl.com/38lkb2u.

Coloring Clip Art

Gordon Worley — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:43:55 +0000

Clipart reproduced in black and white can have color added to the image using an image editing program.

To color clip art download a black and white clipart image from http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/index.htm

Open the B&W clipart image in GIMP, a free Open Source image editing program, or use your favorite program like Photoshop. If using a program other then GIMP the exact steps will be different. Change the Image Mode to RGB, select Image > Mode > RGB. Create a new layer above the background clipart layer. Set the layer blending mode to Multiply, this allows the black color to show through the color being applied. On the new layer add colors using the paint brush and other coloring tools.

Extensions: To help manage colors create a new layer for each color used, be sure to set the blending mode to multiply for each layer. If you place two or more colors on one layer they can be blended together using the smear tool.

Educational: Providing students the opportunity to color an image gives them a task to accomplish that requires examining details within the image.

Illustrating Lit2Go Stories

Gordon Worley — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 17:35:09 +0000

Lit2Go provides copyright free audio stories for educational use. You can find Lit2Go stories within iTunes U Lit2Go and on the Web at http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/index.htm. The web site provides PDF files for each story providing text and images which allow students to read along with the audio. Each PDF has one or more graphics selected from our Clip-art collection.

Lesson idea: Play a short story or poem for your class, while listening have students sketch or list items in the story. After hearing the story have students create an illustration based on an event within the story, provide students with paper and drawing tools or a software drawing program to complete this task.