MI 06 TransLine

1.What did we do?

There were four steps to this project, for the first one we all grabbed a generous amount of paper and a black sharpie marker. Then we listened to the music that was being played and made marks that went along with the feeling of the music.

For the second part of the project, we decided which two drawings that we liked the nest and then we all went into the computer lab and used the scanners to make a digital copy of our art. We saved the image onto the desktop and opened up Adobe Illustrator.

The third part to this project was playing with the digitalized image in Adobe Illustrator. Here’s a more in depth description of what we did:

The image was a bitmap and we converted it into a vector. We clicked on the image with the black arrow and then clicked on “image trace”- this makes it a vector. Click expand and then click off the picture (into the grey area) to deselect. Then get the white arrow and move mouse to corner of the image. Delete the “bounding box” (the blue selection around the image. Anchor handle using the white arrow, it will highlight blue. Then move the line around, you can also fill it in with different colors.

The tools that we used were the trans tool and the color guide tool.

For the fourth step in the process of the project, we made ink jet prints on photo paper using the ink jet printer. My prints were very nice and had a glossy sheen.

After all of the process of making the project, we pinned our prints up on the critique wall and made comments about what we noticed throughout all of them. I noticed that some of them looked like maps and some of them had different styles and energy about them.

2.What did you learn?

I learned how to digitalize a drawing by scanning it and also using adobe illustrator to manipulate the lines into a way that I find appealing and coloring them. I also learned how to use the ink jet printer, the quality was very nice and enhanced the image a lot.

Aside from the physical aspect of the project, I practiced drawing to music, which was something that I’ve done before and forgot how fun it was. Also the critique helps with observational skills.

3.What do you want to know now?

I would like to know how students would react to this in a classroom. I could see that students would be making multiple prints and going back and forth between the classroom and the lab. The fact that you can digitalize and alter an artwork seems like something that would be helpful and fun for students, and seeing the difference between the original drawing and the print is very exciting.

I would also like to know all of the possibilities that this could open up for other projects.

4.How might we work with these tools in classrooms?

This tool could help students make adjustments to physical drawings to make it look more like how they are wanting, or they could use this tool to take a drawing that they have made and make it look abstract or distorted.