Original (Beacon Gold Chandelier), student computer generated distortion, student close up abstraction

LMCES Art instructor Mrs. Mary Dudding and Media instructor Mrs. Jan Mathews have been awarded a Best Buy “teach” Award, which recognizes efforts to integrate technology throughout the curriculum.  The “teach” Award comes with a $2,500 gift card to Best Buy, which will be used to purchase new photo and video editing software.

The winning project, "Getting from Here to There:  Reality-Distortion-Abstraction," is a collaborative effort between Mrs. Dudding's 5^th Grade Art class and their Computer class with Mrs. Mathews, specifically photo editing, and its creative and ethical use and misuse.  Each student creates a distorted image and uses it as the basis to create an abstraction.  The end result is a piece of original art that  demonstrates an evolution in image, thought and expression. 

The initial stage of the project involves learning to use photo editing software and includes the analysis of altered photos, which received wide circulation in the electronic, print and broadcast media.  The photos, some created as a means of artistic expression and others for fraudulent purposes, impress the flexibility of the software, the power of image, and the need to be skeptical in the digital age.  With that as a basis, the students view a photo archive of a particular area of study; in this case a virtual tour of Berrien County's public sculpture was featured.  The students reinterpreted the sculptures, distorting them to create original forms, which were printed.  In Art class, after lessons in materials, color blending, and scale drawing, the students isolated a 1-square inch of the new image to create a large scale abstraction.