Monday 8 June 2015

Deconstructing the Great Wave

The KS3 Art & Design materials resulting from the students' choice of Hemy's 'Through Sea and Air' at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, present the challenge of analysing the significant differences and similarities between this oil painting and Katsushika Hokusai's famous woodblock print 'Great Wave off Kanagawa'.
In making the short film for the resource, I used Photoshop Elements magic wand and layers to deconstruct the woodblock print into its constituent colours. 
This additional film made since the resource explains how. The process is straightforward and has been tried successfully with pupils in upper KS2 and above.

As well as aiding understanding of the components of any solid block printing technique, it can also be used can be used in conjunction with Photoshop's ability to change or substitute colours, to experiment with the effect of reworking pieces using radically different palettes.
The same technique can also be used in a similar way with the free, open-source software 'Gimp'.

No comments:

Post a Comment