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.