Jillian Keyes

You Are What You Eat: Digital Painting

Grade/s: High school Level 1

Time Required: 8 periods of 45 minutes

Enduring Idea: Food

Unit Title: You Are What You Eat: Digital Painting

Key Concept: Sustainment

Unit Designer: Jillian Keyes

Essential Question: What foods do you consider to be necessary for sustaining life?

Unit Description: During this lesson, the students will create a digital self-portrait made up of different foods that represent the parts of their faces. The students will use Wacom tablets and Photoshop to digitally draw the food items on a layer on top of a photo of themselves.

Outline of Class Meetings:

Day 1: Introduction with visual exemplars, student photos taken & uploaded, Photoshop demo

Day 2: Photoshop & Wacom tablet demos, Student research

Day 3: Studio

Day 4: Studio

Day 5: Studio

Day 6: Studio

Day 7: Studio

Day 8: Studio, submittion, review

NCCAS Art:           

• VAH1-1.4 Apply materials, techniques, and processes with skill, confidence, and sensitivity sufficient to make his or her intentions observable in the artwork that he or she creates.

• VAH1-2.2 Create works of visual art that use the elements and principles of design and other compositional strategies.

• VAH1-3.3 Select and effectively use subject matter, symbols, and ideas to communicate meaning through his or her artworks.

Learning Outcomes:

1. The students will create a digital self-portrait in Photoshop comprised of drawn pictures of different foods.

2. The students will use Wacom tablets to draw the food in at least 5 different layers in Photoshop.

3. The students will have their photos taken and use them for the base layer for their image.

4. The students will select foods based on the shapes and colors in their faces and their own personal interests.

Artists: The artists I have chosen for this key concept are Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Sandy Skoglund. The first artist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, is an Italian painter who was born in Milan in 1527. His most known works are his portraits made entirely of vegetables, fruits, and other natural materials. His vegetable portrait paintings are the main inspiration for this lesson. The pieces I chose to show in this lesson from Arcimboldo are Vortumnus and Spring. The second artist, Sandy Skoglund, is an American photographer and installation artist, born in 1946 in Quincy, Massachusetts. She is most known for her installation photographs of various scenes made up of multiples of the same object or subject matter and bright, contrasting colors. The artworks that I chose for this lesson by Skoglund are The Cocktail Party and Remaining Popcorn. I chose Sandy Skoglund for this lesson because in the pieces I chose, she took objects and covered them in a separate skin and in these particular pieces, she used food.

Images: