Turning Sketchup models into Dzine AI renders

7th Graders made the castles above from sketchup models.

Students spent 2-3 days learning sketchup as described in <<this old post>>. Then on Day 4, I showed them how to import their screenshots into Dzine.ai as structure references. The class brainstormed interesting prompt ideas like: "Castle underwater surrounded by coral and sharks" or "Castle next to a volcano, at night with lightning in the sky, a lava river . . ."

Students made these with structure match at 0.8. A few beautiful castles had mid or low structure match levels, but I haven't posted those here.

I suggested everyone start with the ANIME styles, especially Vivid Tableaux.

Above: Emily, Tanay, Alexia

Beyond the Rule of Thirds: A New Paradigm for Grand Compositions

Tactics for 11th and 12th.

This semester, tens of thousands of secondary art teachers gave presentations on good composition. All probably taught students about the rule of thirds and atmospheric perspective. Half probably discussed leading lines, balance, avoiding tangent edges, and the virtues of worm's eye view.

These prescriptions are useful (and I teach some of these principles too—especially unusual camera angles). But if your top students follow all of the above, they'll still only rise to Level 4 or 5 (on 1-to-10, newb-to-pro scale). 

In this post, you'll see another magic bullet that doesn't get talked about: a growth-hack that will lift your best students' art to Level 7. You'll hear from Paul Felix, one of the top 15 illustrators living today (he designed San Fransokyo for Big Hero 6). You'll also learn what artists like Kandinsky and Klee did wrong. The new tricks take a minute to learn and yield highly effective paintings.

We'll start by looking at what Aurélie Bouquet, a French illustrator, painted from a reference photo. How did she change the scene she observed? 

She narrowed contrast within the grass, within the trees, and the on the donkey. 

Look what she did to the telephone pole: it almost disappears into the hill behind it. Why did she paint the pole so faintly?

Also, why did she enlarge the mass of trees behind the donkey? The first answer is she wanted to create

Art Lesson: Rectangle of Destiny

 

Lesson for 9th grade, 6 weeks, acrylics or gouache

Above: Kotoko and Maxine develop their paintings, inspired by the styles and colors inside their rectangles. Students did a few days of color mixing exercises at the start of this project. Beyond color mixing, they leveled-up their composition skills and visual storytelling skills during this project.

Art Lesson: Botanical Abstract Paintings

Lesson for 9th or 10th, 5 weeks:

Before they were professionals

Imagine that each high school student stands on a ladder representing their lifetime growth as an artist. But usually, the students can't see what's ahead of them, what potential they have to grow. Why not show them the stories-in-pictures below, so they can see what years of study and practice can accomplish.

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Anthony Avon - from age 16 to 24

Henrik Rosenborg - from age 16 to 26

Art Lesson: Oil Painting from a Grisaille layer

In IBDP, what does a 4 vs 5,6,7 artwork look like?

student work, 7 score

New IB visual arts teachers struggle to accurately score their IAs because they don't know what a 4, 5, 6, and 7 look like. And actually, even veteran IBVA teachers, when they try to become moderators, get turned away all the time because they have a different idea than the master examiner about what a 4 vs a 5,6,7 should look like.

If it's this hard for teachers, imagine how hard it is for new DP1 students. They have NO IDEA, even after studying the rubric, what a 4 vs 5,6,7 looks like. They think: As a 16yo artist, what's expected of me?

To solve this problem, I made this student-facing slideshow. I'm thinking in percentiles: What does a painting characteristic of the 50th versus 70th, 90th, 95th, or 99th percentile look like? How about a photo or a sculpture?

This slideshow has serious limitations, discussed on slide 2, but it works best when a teacher presents and discusses with students. That's because my students (and maybe yours) want to see how good a 6 or 7 must be to reach the 91st or 98th percentiles, respectively.

(And I'm always reminding myself that if 16,000 students take DP Visual Arts in a given year, only about 450 will score 7 on their EX. It's a scary-low number).

Art Lesson: Illustrated Letters

 Lesson for 7th - 10th, 3 weeks:

Inspired by <<Typefight>>, the 3-year-long graphic design tournament. Students design an illustrated letter in the style of one of the nine master artists below:

7th uses only gouache, and I subtract Klimt from their bank of artists to choose.  I give them 75% longer to finish the project (they need more class time). Below, they're practicing mixing colors:

IBVA Showcase

11th-grade IB Visual Arts cohort made these a long time back, but I wasn't allowed to publish these until now (IB rules). Students' only constraint was that they had to choose a limited palette.

Each canvas shown below is VERY LARGE:

Art Lesson: Interiors in Perspective

10th-grade Art Lesson: 

When I was in school, my art classes never taught perspective. Blessing in disguise, because I learned from a wonderful book linked at the bottom of this post. That book took me farther down the rabbit hole than any reasonable kid would go (ex: book got me sketching praying mantises and alligators in perspective). Nothing has increased my breadth as an artist more than leveling up my perspective drawing skills.

One cool thing about teaching perspective: students who do well here are often different from those who do well with the other art lessons I run. But be warned that this is a challenging lesson for all students, and you'll be working closely with each of them to get their paintings across the finish line.

Accommodation for weaker students: They may work in monochromatic watercolor.

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The students are charged with designing an interior for a themed resort hotel (themes = haunted forest theme, cats theme, pirate theme, and so on). 

They have to figure out lighting and how to render their interesting interior objects in perspective, with cast shadows, etc. Top examples:

Laser-cut Islamic Windows

Here's one for advanced, self-motivated 10th or 11th graders. It's tricky—but it's great for a motivated few. I usually offer this as an OPTION for students who want to level-up their Illustrator skills. Aspiring architects or graphic designers opt in.

You need Adobe Illustrator. This program lets you build grids from which you'll make repeating patterns. The student might try making a few islamic patterns like this or this.

Making grids is trickier than it sounds because these aren't rectangular—they often mix different-sized hexagons or octagons.

More than that, the shapes have to be connected like a stencil. When done correctly, the technique produces windows like these:

Ideally, you'll pair a student who wants to learn Adobe Illustrator with one who wants to learn arduinos. Then the arduino student programs the LEDs (perhaps changing colors or intensities) that will sit behind the islamic windows, encased in a wax paper lightbox.

Art Lesson: Inventive Color Painting

 

Here's one for 10th, inspired by Claudia Carr. 

What holds you back from teaching digital painting? (Bonus: A killer first digital lesson)

 

Problem: Your students' digital paintings look flat, cartoony, over-blended. Maybe because you don't like the look of it, you avoid teaching digital art. Big mistake. Your kids need to understand digital art, and they need your support.

Solution: Teach your kids the Joon Ahn Technique to inject texture into their digital art.

2-3 class periods for 10th, 11th, or 12th:

Drawing Trees and Clouds: Best Practices

 

Texture Safari

Richard Vander Wende established the visual style for Disney's Aladdin and Riven.  

In an 8th, 9th, or 10th-grade art class, I'll often introduce kids to photography by sending them on a  Texture Safari

   

For 12th-grade or college students:

After photographing textures, students digital paint them as they'd appear in 3D with light and shadow. Students must already understand digital painting and perspective. They should also understand how to depict gloss and specularity. What a great portfolio piece!!

 

Matt Kohr - rock study

All photographs copyright (c) Richard Vander Wende. See his website here.

(This was originally published to my other blog)

Guidance for students who want to digital paint

I've tried every tutorial and every mainstream digital painting product that exists (yep, it took a long time too). Below is a handout I've curated—advice distilled from all the top Disney, Pixar, Naughty Dog, Riot Games artists. This is for students who want to teach themselves digital painting or level-up their digital painting. 

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Photoshop is the best digital painting program, which means you'll need a Wacom or Huion.

Software and Hardware:

You’ll need a Wacom tablet or a Huion tablet (cheaper than Wacom but same quality). You don’t need a cintiq. An intuos small or medium is perfect and portable. Large tablets aren’t portable, so avoid them. Procreate is okay too, but doesn't allow you to do nearly as many cool things as PS. BTW, pros don’t use Procreate, they use Photoshop, so if you have professional aspirations . . . 

To start, you should know: 

1. Selections (lasso, magic wand, quick select, select color range) 

2. CMD+SHIFT+N for new layer; CMD+J for duplicate layer 

3. Hold Spacebar to move screen around 

4. Zoom shortcuts 

5. layer types (Normal, lighten, darken, multiply, screen, color) 

6. Transform (CMD+T), including warp and perspective transform. 

7. Eye-dropper (hold down OPTION) 

8. B for Brush; E for eraser 

9. Curves 

10. Layer masks 

During your first 25 digital paintings (follow these habits): 

1. Take your time. If it took a pro 4 hours to do a painting, it should take you 12 or 16 to do the same. No, seriously. But after you’ve done 25 paintings, you’ll be much faster. 

2. Stay focused. 25 paintings? 25 PAINTINGS?? That’s a ton of commitment, as in it might take you 1-2 years to struggle through these (or 1-2 months if you’re a machine). You have to complete 25 15-hour paintings to get good. Sorry to say there’s no shortcut. 

3. Paint from photo refs or film stills for your first 25. No stylized illustrations yet, because they’ll slow down your growth as an artist. (I’m just giving you directions to level-up as quickly as possible.) Don’t worry, your personal style will be waiting for you when you complete your 25 realistic paintings. It’s like if you want to be a good basketball player, you can’t just play pickup games. You have to practice shooting free throws too! (Luckily, painting film stills is more fun than free throw practice.)

4. No tracing. Measure relative distances instead. Look at your ref and figure out what’s ¼, ½, and ¾ of the way across your image from right to left. In a landscape, find your horizon line and vanishing points. 

5. Start monochromatic: either B&W, Sepia-toned, or Blue&White. Your hand-eye coordination will be terrible for your first few paintings, so monochromatic simplifies things. When you feel comfortable making marks on the tablet (probably around painting #4), then bring in color if you want.  

6. Don’t share these on social media right away. Save that as a reward for finishing your first 8 or 10. It’s a good motivator (“I’ve got to finish these so I can show them off!) Ideally you wouldn’t push ANY to social media until you finish your 25, but we’re human, after all.  

7. Beware of YouTube tutorial time-wastey spirals (where you squander hours watching YouTube how-to-paint videos, pretending that just watching them will magically make you better). Focus on completing your 25 paintings ASAP. 

8. When is it productive to surf the web? When you’re stuck and don’t know how to paint something, like grass. To paint grass, look at how the masters did it. Google “Russian landscape painting” and for shrubs, google “garden painting” or “totoro background art.” Whatever artistic problem you’re trying to solve has already been solved by someone.

During your first 25 digital paintings (Technical Tricks):

1. Start with a big brush and block in your big shapes. You don’t need to draw outlines or line art when you’re painting.

2. You only need 2-6 brushes. Quickly increase/decrease the brush size by pressing the keys ] and [.

3. Flip back and forth between two colors by pressing X. Handy for doing light side and shadow side of an object.

4. Handy trick: If you want to “color in” a big shape, select it with the lasso tool, then use a big brush. If you want to erase a big shape, select it with the lasso tool first, then use an eraser. Also try the quick select tool. (Robert Kondo teaches this in his Schoolism class: see below)

Brushes for Photoshop:

With so many brushes available on the web, where do you start? Remember, you only need 2-6 brushes. I probably use 4 on a typical painting.

Use either Shaddy’s brushes or John Park’s brushes. 

Ignore Kyles Brushes, Tuomas Korpi’s brushes, and all the other clutter out there for now.

Shaddy: http://onepixelbrush.com/tutorials/   (Free brushes)

John Park:  https://gumroad.com/jparked  (brushes included with any tutorial) 

Best tutorials for digital painting:

John Park’s gumroad — here’s a good one: https://gumroad.com/jparked#Yubcm

Robert Kondo’s class on Schoolism ($30/mo)

Shaddy’s tutorial series (001 – 008; skip 000) on YouTube — advanced digital painters should try his style — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NygkJEc3yu4 

 

Finally, watch these 2 videos:

Top 5 Shading Mistakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrHfrncvODQ

Top 5 Drawing Mistakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCZIqbRDphs&vl=en

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More digital artists to measure your progress against: Wenjun Lin, Takeshi Oga, Krenz Cushart, Tuomas Korpi, Jaime Jones, Joon Ahn, Loish, Helen Chen, Kevin Nelson, Pablo Carpio 

Get on Artstation and build your own list of artists to follow, but don't let that cut into your practice time. 

Now you have all the best tools available for improving yourself.

DL Lesson: Real-world Design Briefs

Distance Learning Lesson Plan for High School Art

You have 3 options for this art project.

Option 1: Design a city on a bridge
Option 2: Design gods and monsters for a Hollywood blockbuster
Option 3: Design windows for high-end fashion brands

All options resemble creative briefs that professional designers get from clients. All options involve research, design, and writing.

I'll have checkpoints for Days 1, 2, and 4. The finished slideshow is due on Day 6.

Recent Hobby - Writing a book

I've been writing and illustrating a book on the side called How to Break Art and Bend Gravity. This project started as a STEAM textbook for one of my courses, but it took a few interesting turns and here we are. About 200 pages written.

From Seth Godin:

This is the huge difference between art and just about everything else we do in life. In all the other parts of our lives, the deal is "If you do this, you will get that." In the world of art, the deal is "Well, other people have done something sort of like what you're hoping to do, and sometimes, but certainly not always, it works out for them. You'll have to do it to find out."

A couple fantastic illustrators are helping me tackle the huge volume of work I'm up against.