Starting A Digital Art Program With Open Source

An anonymous reader writes "We are running mainly Windows on our HS campus with the exception of Macs in the visual arts department, and are just beginning to get into the process of teaching using computers in the area of art. What recommendations do you have for starting a program? I am looking fo apps that will be able to be used on both our Macs and on our PCs in the Library etc., and specifically I am looking for a program (curriculum, not software) for teaching digital art concepts using the FOSS tools that are out there. I am aware of Gimp, Blender, and Inkscape, but have not seen any curriculum per se. Any help?"

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Shameless Self-Promotion

[3) profit!!!]

If you're doing any pixel art on the Mac, you can use Pixen. It's doesn't really compare to something like the GIMP for large-scale images (it starts getting slow for images greater than about 300x300, especially if you have multiple layers), but for icons, isometric-style stuff, and other pixelly art, it's the best open source tool for OS X that I know of. (Of course, I'm one of the developers, so I may be a bit biased...)

Personally...

[glk572]

I like to approach art education form a goal oriented standpoint. I can speak for learning blender, and the tutorials are pretty good, I would start by walking them through the building a castle tutorial, and then pretty much set them free. Have them come up with a project, I would highly suggest starting with a building, as it is much easier to deal with than modeling living things.

I for one don't like Gimp, although it is a powerful tool, it lacks some of the most powerful and useful tools available for photoshop. Look into a site license for photoshop it is really not as extravagantly expensive in an educational license as the commercial ones.

As for a pre-made curriculum, I suspect that you're SOL. It should be pretty easy though to adapt existing self learning tutorials for your students.

Tutorials are at:
http://www.blender3d.com/cms/Tutorials.243.0. html

For learning 2D I would suggest a brief intro to vector drawing, using Illustrator, or my personal preference AutoCad. I come from a technical drawing background and find that AutoCad is my favorite vector drawing program, although it is very-much overkill.

After vector drawing I would introduce them to photo manipulation, take inspiration from the fark.com photoshop contests. Give the students a photo to manipulate and have them show their work to the class.

I would suggest that you use the format of assigning work and teaching skills on monday, free work for the middle of the week, and then on friday have the students show their work to the class and discuss their experiences.

Here at WWU in my department all design majors are required to take a course called "Introduction to Design Communication," this is a basic overview art course that teaches drawing, painting, illustration, and drafting. This was easily my favorite class I have ever taken. It is formated with the professors sharing their design work with the students, and teaching their personal techniques. The goal is to get the students up to speed so that they can begin to develop their own style.

Just remember that there is not right way to do anything in art. Start by showing the students how you work and let them use that as a launching point.

I would highly suggest the following Books/Films:
Technical Drawing by Frederick E. Giesecke et. al.
Shrek DVD bonus feature on the making of.
mindfields and all it's great making of info (http://www.artificial3d.com/mindfields/)
Any textbook on mechanical perspective (can't think of one off the top of my head)
The Blender book
and of course the Blender tutorials mentioned earlier.

Technical Drawing gives a great deal of information on mechanical drawing and is a great foundation of knowledge for the instructor to have. The Shrek DVD bonus features are a great source of inspiration for beginning artists, and also shows the students that even the pros make mistakes. Mechanical perspective is critical to understanding how we perceive depth and should be taught to students as they learn 3D modeling. Mindfields is fabulous as you can see the film and then get an in depth tutorial on exactly how it was made.

I would have to say that 2d image manipulation is much more intuitive than 3d modeling, and should be taught as a tool to rather than a goal. I would suggest visiting my own website, even though there isn't much there (they now only allow sftp now so I can't upload form dreamweaver (I'm lazy)) it has some stuff that wile time consuming is actually quite easy to do.

if you're interested in talking about cg art education my aim id is "glk572" and I'll be keeping an eye on this thread.

So to sum it up teach a foundation of skills that will allow the students to achieve their own goals. Have the students discuss and show their work. Focus on results and not methods.

Trail blazing

[tverbeek]

I wouldn't hold out much hope of finding a curriculum based around Libre software, because what's out there generally isn't very suitable for learning digital art. The GIMP is the granddaddy in this segment, and only just reached the point (with 2.0) where I'd even show it to a creative professional, out of embarassment. GIMP 1.x was practically a poster child for poorly designed, counter-intuitive interfaces. 2.0 is probably OK for newbies to digital painting to explore with, but if you build a good intro class around it, you'll probably be the first.

I do tech support for an art school, and I also picked up a BFA there, so I have a pretty good sense of the kinds of tools needed to teach digital media effectively. I promote the use of Libre software here as much as anywhere else I've worked, but I have to admit that there's little use for it in the classrooms (except for mainstream officeware like OOo and Firefox). Macromedia's apps and Photoshop Elements aren't Gratis or Libre, but they're fairly inexpensive for schools, and meet the rest of your requirements (e.g. cross platform, curricula) pretty well.

I'm setting up one of my old Macs for sale to a student, and in trying to "add value" with some free apps they'd actually have use for, the best I could come up with was GIMP (which I'm sure they'll delete and replace with a cracked or educational-licence copy of Photoshop) and WordPress for blogging.

Libre stuff might be OK if you're just trying to help high school students get their feet wet, but if you're trying to prepare people to do this stuff as professionals, you need to teach them the software the industry uses. Employers don't want someone with digital-paint-program vector-drawing-program experience; they want someone with Photoshop and Illustrator/Freehand experience. (They'll usually settle for Windows users, but they'd rather have someone who knows his way around OS X.) And freelancers are going to want to be proficient in the best tools they can afford, and that's also going to be commercial software.

I think what you're doing is a great idea, and I don't want to discourage it, but it's definitely going to be an uphill battle. Best of luck, and if you pull it off... please share what you learn from it!