Advanced Art

Original Character Design Unit

This unit starts with a figure drawing lesson. Students are given one minute to draw a human pose, then the time increases to two minutes, five minutes, and finally, a ten-minute pose. This is the pre-assessment and it is how I gauge students’ prior knowledge and adaptability. After a demonstration and a few more figure drawing poses, we begin discussing successful cartoon characters and play a game where students have to guess the character based on its silhouette. We study body shapes and what they mean, then students try drawing their own versions of different character prompts (clown, baby, giant, etc.). They are given a character prompt that they then need to develop over the following few weeks. For these students, the prompt is “modern deities”. They must answer questions about their character such as: are they a hero, villain, or side character? Who are their friends/enemies? What are their powers?

Once they have an understanding of their character’s personality, they draw 25 different bodies, 25 faces, 5 expressions, 5 hands, and 5 feet. This takes about a week and a half, during which time they are also developing backstories and personalities for their characters. Once they have all the major components, it is time to put them together and choose a color pallet. The final assessment is two-fold: first is a character turnaround sheet, after which, each student designs a comic book cover featuring their original character.

Media Art

Movie Poster Redesign Unit

This is something new for me to teach, but it is an area in which I have extensive experience. The Media Arts Academy at El Diamante is very well planned out. Each unit pertains to an area of media arts. These students were just finishing up a large video project when I joined the classroom. It was delightful to see which groups were excited to show their short videos and which ones were biting their nails. In this unit, students are individually recreating a movie poster. We cannot just jump into using a medium in which they have never worked, so we need to practice some photoshopping techniques first.

Assignments in this unit include: isolating an image of a mountain range and placing it under a new sky with a spaceship, face-swapping presidents with famous groups of five, fixing an old, damaged photograph, clearing acne off of a face, applying various filters to the same image, and creating a double-exposer effect with two different images. Now, they are ready to redesign a movie poster.