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Straightforward Sensory Animation Lesson Plan for k-12 Teachers - The Mindful Class

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Digital devices are addictive.   That's like saying water is wet, or exercise is hard.   Maybe you hesitate to use digital devices in an art class – especially if your focus is on calming the body/mind, and integrating the senses for a better quality of life. But nearly every classroom has the devices, and there are ways to make them work for students.   Two Options of Many Here are two straightforward programs for animation projects (the first one has a free-with-ads version available): -  Flipaclip digital animation -  Frameographer stop motion capture application (Stop Motion seems like a good, free alternative app, but I haven't tried it yet.) Both have onion skinning (a see-through frame) available, which can help students build their understanding of movement, or 4D media.  Onion skinning is the term for seeing the layer underneath, aka the previous frame. When I started learning animation, this was done by holding the separate sheets of paper anchored to the register b

3 Portrait Painting Approaches - burnt sienna, tonal planes, and using colors as tones

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I'm teaching portrait painting classes again :)  [sign up here for more information about future classes] Lucy and Jaune , acrylic on paper copyright Julia Gandrud 2016 The first time I taught portrait painting classes was back in 2007, and again in 2009, at DotArt in Dorchester, Massachusetts. I led a class of a dozen young adults, high school sophomores through beginning college-aged kids. The day-long classes met every day for six weeks in the summer inside a church at Ashmont Station.  It was part of an initiative to keep kids off the streets, but it was pure fun for me. I had one very capable young assistant, a talented painter himself.   I taught the students how to use acrylic paints to build vitality and structure, as well as graphic line definitions, relying heavily on cadmium red hues, burnt siennas, and ultramarine blues. That final project included striking Shakespearean cutouts, as the director had enlisted the help of a Shakespeare in the Park actor. It's long ag

How to get started with Midjourney image-generating AI software

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This Midjourney exploration was sponsored by the RI STEAM Center . All the AI image generator options can be confusing. If you're completely new to it, here's how to delve in with one of the options. First off, there's no free Midjourney trial. Don't even get me started on the inequity of access... But that's where we are. To try out Midjourney, you need to pay for the subscription-based model. BlueWillow was a free option for a while, but now LimeWire acquired BlueWillow. You can make around 10 for free. The prompts are easy on the LimeWire site – the results using Blue Willow are, at this moment, less accurately following prompts, more likely to have unintentional wonky cubist output, and less finished looking. Here's a comparison between Blue Willow and Midjourney using the same prompt:  "happy fluffy black cat in sunlight in autumn leaves" Midjourney version BlueWillow version (they only give one per credit) Aside : LimeWire has a skeevy history .

Getting OpenAI access for public schools and art educators

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I'm a massive fan of Jo Penn and her Creative Penn podcast . Thanks to her, I knew to get involved with AI tools rather than leaving them all to tech types.    And now I feel like a puny artist in the face of the Borg ... A is for STEAM copyright Julia Gandrud In August, I wrote to Open AI to see if they'd grant educators access to DALL-E without a paywall. No answer. In September, I tried to get educator licenses from Midjourney, but they don't offer any system.    After a couple of weeks, I wrote a letter to Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher because they show how aware of the issue they are: Dear Kara Swisher and Fabulous Scott, I'm an artist and art educator, and I have a bone to pick with OpenAI. I'd love your thoughts on this.    While ChatGPT remains accessible without charge, likely benefiting from user interactions for improvement, tools like Dall-E and MidJourney are gated behind a paywall, even for trial use. This presents a challenge for artists and studen

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