Potential Improvements

With how much stuff we go over in one day it’s understandable that some things slip our minds and or are not covered enough. Not to mention some things just happen that you can never fully prepare for that throw everything off course. So without further delay, some ideas.

Wacom Pen Tablet

• I feel like this really needed more explanation considering that most people in this class will be completely unacquainted with it.
• When demoing the device, people need to be able to see what you are doing over top of it. I’ve found that this is a necessary thing for people to understand that it works just like a pen to paper. Only digitally.
• Also there should have been a little more explanation of its capability’s, such as pressure sensitivity, and tilt that allow a user to interact far more naturally with Photoshop.
• Also some time spent allowing those who are interested to play with it would have been good. (I wasn’t sold on buying a tablet till I got to actually use one, now I own 3)

Printing 

• Go over all of the settings needed for a proper print with the entire class.
• Would have reduced the number of times we had to individually set up peoples prints.
• I myself had forgotten where some of the dialogs were buried.
• We had at least 2 misprints caused by a hidden setting that were incorrect

Raster VS Vector

• This is more fluff than necessary however I feel as though it might be a good idea to cover at some basic level that Photoshop is a raster imaging program. Basically that it’s manipulating a bitmap and as such has a finite resolution (and is why we had to “re-size” our images before printing). while a Vector program like illustrator or Inscape do not have a finite resolution.

The Third Week

I’m sort of at a loss on what to post about this week as the class session went over quite well. Obviously we didn’t hit all the points that we wanted to for this week however that is understandable considering that we were already behind schedule going in.

Obviously if we really had to adhere closely to schedule we should have skipped or at least cut down the critique time. However given that the students were actually getting in to the critique, it made sense to continue on. I found it particularly nice how open most students were with pointing out stuff that didn’t work. My history in critiques is a lot of people saying what they like and then the few that had something negative would just dance around their opinion as though they were unsure or dint want to offend anyone.

For next week I’m well on my way towards having, hopefully, the final draft of the compression write up. I’ve had it completely spellchecked by a human, and will have it checked one more time before posting.

Solo Teaching

For the last class I had my first run in with functioning as the soul teacher present in the class. This was rather unforeseen, or at least not expected to have occurred as early on as it did. Despite my relative inexperience with directly teaching a group of individuals it seemed like what I was explaining and showing was making it threw just fine. Few had questions and most were related to things outside of what I was teaching such as when the next blog entry was due.

But to my dismay, I was unable to get them to talk much when it was time to discuss everyone’s responses to the PressPausePlay video we had watched for the journal entries.  I had never realized how tricky it must be to get a bunch of students to actually share their thoughts till now as it took a lot of prodding to just get a few words out of any of them. This is in-lew of the fact that they were all happily chatting away about their entry’s and the video just seconds before I asked them to share their opinions with the class.

My best guess at why they suddenly clammed up a pawn being handed the spot light is related to this being our second meeting ever, and that they will open up with time. However I also suspect that the fact that I’m a student, and not an actual professor, might have contributed negatively to the situation.

First Impressions

The first impressions of anything mean a lot to everyone. How you introduce yourself and how you introduce others to new things determines a lot of how they react to that new thing. Because of this I’m going to spend this entry tossing about possible improvements to the first day of class and to the class’s introduction to Photoshop.

The good…

• The section of “get to know me” at the beginning worked well as an icebreaker. It was entertaining to find how similar their summers were and they seemed to be more talkative after it.
• The presentation of PresPausPlay was a good idea for introducing the students to professional/practicing artists that work with similar mediums. 

The Bad…

• We really should have covered the art server as a part of the saving process or before opening up Photoshop. There were several people that asked me how to save to the server and there was at least one incident of a student not being able to retrieve her work off of the mac at a later date.

• I need to brush up on Photoshop, I have been heavily using Flash for the last 3 months that I was confusing flash functions with Photoshop and in the end looked rather un trained in Photoshop.

•  For the demos on still life, I feel that presenting some that were constructed in the same manner as we were in class would have helped.

•  Starting Photoshop without forcing it to the same layout caused confusion and a few problems. A short thing about its layout settings could have prevented this. 

For the Future…
Maybe not now but at some point, I feel like it would be a good idea to introduce people to the many alternative input methods of Photoshop. Most artists are already familiar with the pen and paper methods of creating which might lead to them benefiting from being introduced to tablets. I myself have found owning a tablet to be an enormous boost to productivity and allow a more natural feeling when interacting with a digital canvas.