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Obj: teach landscape principles via computers emphasizing:
overlapping, background, foreground, Middle ground and illusion of depth
1. Draw horizon line about 2/3 up monitor page
2. Draw a line to represent mountains above the horizon explaining
section now represents foreground, middle and back ground areas.
3. At bottom of page use the drawing tool to draw a large tree from
the bottom to the top of the page, extending branches, etc.
4. They can add a few other large objects such as rocks, house
etc.in the foreground
5. Below the horizon line (middle ground) draw a middle size tree,
copy and paste it
in several positions, staggering it at random
6. Now choose a "tree stamp" and blast the mountains with tons of
7. Add color and anything else they want keeping in mind the
things getting smaller in the distance
8. Also add texture to large tree and objects "up close" at the
bottom of page.
Remind students that objects further away have less detail and are
faded by atmospheric conditions.
All these projects were successful for the kids and they loved them
while learning the principles of depth, overlapping etc. They learned
much faster than if they had to draw freehand on paper.
Another project I did was having the kids import a digital picture of a
person into Adobe photoshop and using a variety of techniques to
transform the portraits. Especially successful were the pointillism
transformations which I then had them draw from in class using
pointillism with markers. Very unique and successful project for 8th
I'd love to hear from you about other lesson plans.
The digital camera was a great tool, but one of the kids took it home
without permission and broke it. Now we can't get it fixed.