8 bit drawing

I grew up playing the NES with great games like Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Blades of Steel and 8 bit art holds a special place in my heart.
Here are some great examples:

• Al Creed's NHL Jerseys
• Google Maps 8 Bit
• 8 Bit Gangnam Style

Seeing the amazing things people can do with pixels never fails to get my creative juices flowing. I wanted to make a Mario Bros. themed video featuring my brother and I, in honour of some of our travels, so I scoured the web for a way to create 8 bit avatars. I found 8bityourself.com, a promo-site for Linkin Park's 8 bit rebellion. It was pretty good. I made versions of my brother and myself and then tweaked them in paint since there were only preset skins to mix and match on the website. I found some screen shots of old NES games and added us in. Check it out.
I have now officially caught the 8 bit bug. I modified my avatar further and made an 8 bit blog header and blog button for ICTyler. I was playing around last night and thought that maybe a dedicated 8 bit drawing program existed somewhere on the internet. I searched a bit today. There was a program called PXLPNT, but its domain is for sale now, so I think it's gone belly up. However, I did find make8bitart.com, a site made by @jennschiffer.

Fittingly, it provides 8 preset colours and lets you save your work, already in a fancy frame. You can also add custom colours if you know their hexadecimal codes. After making a few calculations, I estimate the pixel size in the final product is 25 by 25 actual pixels. It's a good size, especially if you consider how small the picture would be if you were actually drawing with a 1 by 1 pixel brush. This is a great site to play with 8 bit drawing; however, I wanted a larger canvas for some of the projects I was working on.

So, I figured out another way: Microsoft Paint! The best part of that is everyone, well everyone with windows, already has it. The new version of Paint does not include a square brush, but it does have a square eraser. The eraser is technically not an eraser at all. It just paints your secondary colour whenever you click. It just so happens, that we often leave our secondary colour the same as our base canvas colour. By modifying the secondary colour I have an easy 8 bit painting tool. Unfortunately, the eraser does not snap to predetermined squares, like make8bitart does with its brush, so you have to be careful when drawing. I use the largest eraser setting to make a large square, but it's up to your preferences. Paint lets you chose canvas size so you can make your 8 bit drawing as large or as small as your heart desires.

Here's how it looks speeded up 12 times as I make my 50th picture for my Picture a Day project:

If you're inspired to make 8 bit art by this, using one of these tools or something else, send me the link in a comment or tweet me @Tyler_JL. I'd love to see what you come up with :)

Tracing: Evolved

A new generation of tracing has arrived. No longer do we need bright lights, thick lines and translucent paper. Now all you have to do is:

• Find the picture you want to trace.
• Open it in an image editor or drawing program that uses layers (like GIMP or what I use to draw, MyPaint).
• Create a new layer and make sure it is on top of the picture.
• Pull out your digital pen and trace away!
• When done, delete the layer that contains the original photo.
• Click 'Save As' (so you don't over-write the original photo if it's saved on your computer) and save your tracing under a new name.
• You've now created your own line drawing!

I added a flowing cape and removed the background from the original in an attempt to make myself more heroic. I placed a line wherever there was a major colour or shade change.
I could now print this out, photocopy it and have the best colouring page of all time. Why spend hours scouring the google-net for suitable clip art? We can make our own!

DISCLAIMER: Make sure to use creative commons or public domain images to stay within the law. 

I used my own picture for this tracing example, so I don't need to credit myself.

101questions: crowd sourcing perplexity

I've followed Dan Meyer { @ddmeyer | dy/dan } for a while now. Here's his bio blurb from his blog:

About

December 24th, 2006 by Dan Meyer

I'm Dan Meyer. I taught high school math between 2004 and 2010 and I am currently studying at Stanford University on a doctoral fellowship. My hobbies include graphic design, filmmaking, motion graphics, and infographics, most of which have found their way into my practice in some way or another. My specific interests include curriculum design (answering the question, "how we design the ideal learning experience for students?") and teacher education (answering the questions, "how do teachers learn?" and "how do we retain more teachers?" and "how do we teach teachers to teach?"). I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

(http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?page_id=2)

Dan has an excellent blog, but is also involved in many web projects as well. One such project caught my eye because of his tweets. Every once in a while he'd tweet a link and ask something along the lines of, "What's the first question that pops into your head when you see this?". This intrigued me. I would click on the link and be taken to 101questions. It looks something like this:

I would type in the first question that came to mind and click submit. I then get to ask a question about the next photo or video. Also, if I no question comes to mind, or item just isn't that interesting, I have the option to skip it.
This is pretty fun on its own, well at least for me, but Dan is using this to collect/create engaging and perplexing activators.
Here's how the project is described on its webstie:

We don’t care how well you lecture. We don’t care how well you engage us. We aren’t impressed by your fancy slide transitions or your interactive whiteboard. We care how well you perplex us.

Can you perplex us? Can you show us something that’ll make us wonder a question so intensely we’ll do anything to figure out the answer, including listen to your lecture or watch your slides? Here’s one way to find out. Upload a photo or a video. Find out how many of us get bored and skip it. Find out how many of us get perplexed and ask a question.

Then figure out what you’re going to do to help us answer it.

Signed,

Your Students 
(http://101qs.com/blog/about/)

 I thought this was a great idea and can relate to the feeling of seeing something and just needing to know how it works, so I joined the site. I haven't put much on yet, but I've already learned some things.

• It's called 101 questions because each post is capped at 101 questions. You ask a question about your post when you upload it and the post is capped at 100 further questions, well more like interactions. Both asking a question and skipping a question count as an interaction. The number of questions out of 100 interactions is what determines the posts perplexity. If no question comes to mind for 100 people and you get 100 skips, chances are students aren't going to be intrigued if you use that photo or video in class.
• The question you have in mind for a particular post may not come to anyone else when they see it. This allows you to get a broader perspective and gauge what types of questions your students would be asking themselves.

This site is fun and a great way we can work together to improve our classrooms. Thanks, Dan!

Show&Tell: Befunky

I found befunky.com trying to find a place to cartoon-ify my photos. I played around with it and like it. So here's a brief tutorial on what it can do and how to do it.

It's also available as an iOS and Android app.

Swing

I have the AVS suite of multimedia software and made this animated gif with the image converter. Click here to see how.

It was cold outside when we took these, but now she'll be forever swinging!

Learning - A visual journey

Learning, a set on Flickr.

I've just created a set on flickr where I will share my learning. I'm very visual and usually study by making pictures. Everything in here will be available to use through a creative commons licence.
I will put things I'm learning in here, things I've used to help students learn, and anything learning related.
I added a slideshow of the set on the pictures page for easy access.

flickr

flickr is a Yahoo! photo hosting and sharing service. I started using it in 2009 because, unlike facebook, it allowed me to keep the rights to my photos and alter them if, and when, I wished.
Originally I found it rather frustrating with upload limits and being unfamiliar with the process. Two things happened to change that. For Christmas my wife got me a pro account, which meant I had unlimited uploads and I downloaded the Uploadr extension. Flickr Uploadr is a downloadable program that easily allows for mass photo uploads. As well, it allows you to pre-organize your photos. I can put pictures in a set or create a new one, change the title, add a description, tag and determine the level of privacy. All this before I even upload them.
With a pro account and Uploader I have not looked back. It has been a great way to share our travels with family and friends. (Especially for ones not one facebook as I leave the vast majority of my pictures free for public viewing.) It also has been fun getting feedback from the public on my pictures. I've even had interest in some of my pictures for publications.

Flickr goes beyond just hosting and sharing though. It offers organization tools, geotagging of photos, public groups, contacts, comments, a favourite option, gallery creation, stats and a host of user created apps.
Photos can be organize in both sets and collections. Sets are akin to albums, whereas collections are thematic collections of albums. When we travel I create a collection for the entire trip and use sets for specific days or places.
My camera doesn't have a GPS, so geotagging is a labour intensive process involving remembering where I was when I took the picture and finding it on a map after uploading it. However, it was great to increase the depth of sharing our travels. People see what we're doing and also where too.

Groups are where flickr really shines. If you can think of it there is probably a group dedicated to it on flickr. I am a member of 23, Empty Seats, and STOP! Signs (Ode to the Octogon) to name a few. I created and oversee Winnipeg Expats, a group dedicated to memories of Winnipeg.
Sharing photos with groups allows your pictures to reach a wider audience and lets you see what other people with the same interests are taking pictures of.
Educationally, groups can help guide students. Doing a research project on the history of particle physics? There are particle physics groups on flickr. Want to show students what types of flowers grow in Australia? Search "flowers" taken in "Australia" on the flickr world map and there you go.
The social aspect of flickr, contacts, comments and such, is another thing that makes it great. I have contacts that I know personally and contacts that I will never meet. Their feedback has been very helpful in my growth as a photographer, as has been viewing their work.
I think flickr users are very proud of the social nature of the site and thus many people are committed to making their photos available for everyone. Flickr gives the option to add photos to the creative commons, with specific licencing options. The licencing is straight forward and easy to see on every picture. As the majority of pictures I share are of personal travels I keep my photos "all rights reserved", but share if people ask.

The sheer quantity and variety of photos available, plus added benefit of a huge selection of free to use photos, makes flickr a great tool to use in education.

On the Way to School

Lately, I've been contemplating how physical geography has been eclipsed by human geography. It seems we can't go anywhere anymore that is natural. There's always a power line or something in the way. (I guess I've gone through a lot of travel photos in the last few years.) I've been trying to figure out how I would represent this in art. So, I include it when I doodle. I drew a tree, but put electrical cables from a power line in front of it and had a bird sitting on the cable instead of the tree.
Anyway, I feel this picture brings out the beauty of a landscape no longer characterized by physical geography, but now by human geography.

Also, (more in hopes of having a reason to post it here than anything) I was thinking of this picture in the context of education and ICT in education specifically. I think as teachers, especially with ICT, we often act as trains. We simply bring the students to where we want them to be. I feel our purpose should be more to light the tracks. To show them what the goal is and how to get there and most importantly that the tracks keep going beyond the classroom station.