Classroots.org

I went all over the place on this one. I wanted to do something with cloning, clones’ rights, and the future, so first I thought I might use a picture of clone troopers (who might thank you with candy), but I decided not to mess with licensed action figures. Then I remembered a pair of mastrobiggo pictures (here and here), but I like the pictures so much that I couldn’t bring myself to add anything to them. Plus, Apple products – what the heck do I do to them without irony?

Back to the clones. I searched for “mirror reflection” and found “Multiple Mirror Reflections” from the_exploratorium. I grabbed the picture and brought it into Acorn. In Acorn, I added the text and pasted and tweaked a CC logo. I enjoyed using the_exploratorium’s image for this assignment because I could desaturate and darken it a lot without losing too much of its color or any of its structure.

I try to work with 4:3 and 3:2 ratios, so I let the darkened top field take up about two thirds of the height of the image without worrying too much about the extra space under the text because I like the way the line between light and dark interacts with different faces at different heights.

Here’s the poster:

Your clones will thank you

I have no real idea how CC might apply to clones, and I fully expect debates about whether one can claim any rights over a clone in the first place. I worry (without enough learning) about the precedents set by genetically modified crops and seed rights. I hope the tagline can be read as all at once sincere, provocative, ambivalent, and ambiguous.

I am glad to have made the time for the poster before design week officially ends. I hope it appeals to another nerd who is as interested in The House of the Scorpion as I am.

Inspired by several campers’ lyric typography posters (2 stars), I decided to go back to this assignment. I passed over it during my design sprint because the first few ideas I tried didn’t work – I wanted to do something purely typographical with the background color being the only non-textual adornment. I couldn’t pull it off by myself. I didn’t really get the examples, which looked good, but didn’t always marry the lyrics and designs in ways I could grok.

My subconscious kicked around a few ideas – I wanted to do something with Radiohead; I played our Florence + the Machine CD on today’s drive to Grammy and Poppy’s.

Here’s what I came up with while working entirely in Acorn.

Florence + the Machine

First, I tackled this Florence + the Machine poster. I had originally thought about using inverted carrots to make teeth for the dog days, but then I decided to try coding some impact into the poster. I used a bold Rockwell font to lend weight and vibrancy to happiness and a few other bits of text. I threw in a bracket and a wide-stanced Bank Gothic font for the hit. I used Cracked (always stop at 3 fonts, Chad!) for “bullet” and rotated some forward and backward slashes to suggest a spider-web of stress fractures from a bullet hole in the middle of the “b”. I also left “bullet” in all lower case to contrast it against the other lines of text which are all capital. Finally, I kerned the last line to -12 (I go past the absolute value of 11) so I could have the text wind back on itself and fit the bottom of the page. I also split it into “in the b” and “ack” so I could make it wind back in a less predictable way. I like the gap. I think it helps punctuate a kind of hard return and possibility of escape up or down the page in the recursive loop that the last line creates. Maybe that’s where the happiness-bullet hole is.

I also worked on a Radiohead poster combining the colors and sans-serif-ness of the In Rainbows album typography (I used a bold Euphemia UCAS font) with lyrics from “Fake Plastic Trees.”

I decided to repeat the line about the town getting rid of itself, omitting one word per iteration so that the quote would get rid of itself. I put the text in a box that takes up most of the page, sized the text to fill the box, and let the line breaks take care of themselves to approximate the random aesthetic common to many pieces of Radiohead art and web design. I love the way the last line doubles itself while disappearing itself. The last bar of background is white to complete the vanishing and create some ambiguity about whether or not there is anything there in an invisible, white font.

Here’s the poster:

Radiohead

I’m very glad I found a way back into this assignment. Thanks, ds106 campers! Learning in community!

In gratitude, let me share this wicked pair of multi-layer stencils of Thom Yorke that a student did as a learning project this year.

Thom Yorke stencil art from a learning project

It’s great to be at camp during summer vacation.

This week I found another block of time through which to sprint after a number of ds106 design assignments. I had some trouble narrowing down which assignments to tackle until I began them; clearly, I do not yet have the patience or chops for some of the work, so it’s great that the ds106 community has shared so many different ideas for assignments. I hope to contribute some ideas this summer and fall as I try to implement a more ds106/MOOC feel in my middle school classroom.

Here are my basic hardware and software specs for the week: MacBook, OSX 10.6.8, 2.26 GHz Intel Core Duo 2, 2 GB of memory, Chrome, Wacom Bamboo tablet, SketchBook Pro (for drawing), Acorn (for fills and copy).

This week the work is not in any particular order. I made an animated comic book cover that looks pretty crummy next to all the awesome examples out there. I don’t yet have the animator’s patience to pull off a decent attempt, so I’ll pass on sharing for now. It was a simple snikt effect.

I’m becoming interested in how the community categorizes tasks. At times today, I definitely felt like a designer; at other times, I felt more like I was tweaking a pre-existing design for my own education (which seems more like a visual task to me), or mashing-up a number of designs. Some of the visual assignments feel like design tasks, too – like the album cover. I’d love to hear more about how contributors and organizers think of course- and task-design.

By week’s end I’d like to contribute a CC poster, as well.

Before I forget, everyone should watch Nishant Shah’s DML Ignite talk on remixes.

And away we go.

Postcards from Magical Places – 2 stars

I take a ton of screenshots in Minecraft. I love discovering new sights in Minecraft, as well as new perspectives on familiar places. I ask students to take a ton of screenshots, too, so I can share their work easily through blogging. (Teaching in a multi-age classroom in a middle school, I haven’t yet solved the riddle of whole-class social media use, so I try to collect and share as many digital photos and artifacts as possible.)

For this assignment, I looked through my ds106-server screenshots, found a picture I liked, cropped it some, and then appended a snappy postcard/bumper-sticker-ready punchline in Acorn. Lastly, I mocked up a simple back for the card and let it be.

Greetings from @chadsansing's

Alternative Book Covers – 3 stars

Since I wrote about how much The Road terrified me when I posted my Liminal States story-shape, and since The Road showed up as the exemplar for this assignment, I went back to Liminal States and riffed on my fake album cover assignment; with Liminal States you really can’t go wrong with a boy and his dog.

However, I wanted to use a different image this time around, so I found ">a picture of a boy dressed as a cowboy riding a dog in The Commons on Flickr.

I brought the photo into Acorn and composed the rest of the cover there, darkening the bottom band to offer better contrast for the tagline.

The boy dressed up as a cowboy reminds me of my [privileged, white male] love for archetypes, even though many of those archetypes make horrible, horrifying decisions, like the genre-riffing characters of Liminal States. Moreover, in the book, youth – the eternal kind – is not all its cracked up to be. Considering the source material, it’s also significant that the boy and the dog clearly have different ideas about what’s going on and are, in fact, headed – or at least looking – in separate directions. The presence of grass is germane to the novel, as well.

I picked Trajan Pro for the font because it has that somber, elegiac, official feel like the title of a Tom Brokaw book.

The tag line is neither entirely true nor entirely false in its description of the book.

Alt Liminal States

Cartoon You – 2 stars

I’ve cartooned myself many times – some examples can be found here, here, and here. There’s even a short comic I drew about the first year of our school out there in a filing cabinet somewhere.

I find using a cartoon alter ego to be very helpful in breaking up the monopoly that text holds over my blogging, and I like to use drawings in class materials, as well. Cartooning is a good way to and bring some humor to the engrimmening proceedings of American public education.

For this assignment I wanted to draw myself differently than I normally do, so I went online and searched after ">an image of Savoy from the comic Chew as drawn by series-artist Rob Guillory. (I have no idea why I’ve never cosplayed Phillip Seymour Hoffman playing Chris Farley playing Savoy, but I know I could rock it.) I like Guillory’s style – it’s cartoony, dynamic, busy; as with Jeffery Brown’s completely different work, it makes me think I could draw a comic. It gives me hope.

I tried to capture Guillory’s sense of Savoy’s form, but left much of the interior clean, as I tend to do in larger work; paradoxically (maybe)I detail little doodles like crazy. I also colored myself for a change since I usually work in black and white.

I drew myself in SketchBook Pro using a 2.5-sized brush rather than a 4.0-sized one so that I my line would look more like Guillory’s and less like mine. I began with a blue-line drawing and then added a layer for a black-line drawing to bring into Acorn. Then I deleted the blue-line layer, switched to Acorn, and colored myself.

Thumbs up, Tiger.

Cartoon Chad

I Can Read Movies – 3 stars

What a cool assignment. I love spacesick’s book covers.

To make my own, I went for a popular, yet nerdy, property – The Lord of the Rings. In looking at spacesick’s use of patterns, I decided to use a ring motif to build Mount Doom and to perch Suaron’s eye atop it. I used a different color/material for each level of rings: silver for the Elves, bronze for the Dwarves, and iron for the humans. While that progression isn’t canonical, I used it to bring more color to the page and to communicate of how Middle Earth rank-orders its species. I could have made the other rings all white and left the one ring golden, but I am not at all unhappy with this design. I wonder also about linking the rings to show their interconnectedness in a chain-mail kind of way.

I used Acorn to compose the cover. I read up on spacesick’s fonts ">here. The projector is the only element I lifted directly from any of spacesick’s covers.

Finally, I opened the image in SketchBook Pro for some final touches with textured brushes to worry the cover.

I’m really eager to see more of these designs from the ds106 community.

spacesick-inspired LotR cover

Chilren’s Book Cover – 0 stars

I’m not sure why this assignment is worth zero stars; I think it should get two.

For this task, I decided to make a children’s book cover for a hard science fiction novel – House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. I love that book. It gives me hope.

My cover, however, gives me the giggles. It’s so profanely incongruous – and yet so weirdly apt – that it delights me.

House Of Suns for kids

I drew the cover in SketchBook Pro and then colored and lettered it in Acorn.

As I hunted down stray pixels in Acorn, I discovered that it’s much easier to draw and paint in that program while zoomed in a level or two (this is both an a-ha and a duh moment). I still prefer SketchBook Pro for drawing, but it was satisfying to find a way to draw and color productively in Acorn, as well. At the default zoom, even a medium-sized brush can disappear on-screen in Acorn because its reticle isn’t persistent. That means if you’re trying to paint stray pixels in Acorn without zooming in, you lose the tip of your brush if your brush color is the same color as your background. That frustrated me greatly, but now I know that it’s easier to keep track of your brush tip while zoomed.

I hope others will jam on the idea of making children’s book covers for novels meant for adults.

Minimalize Your Philosophy – 2 stars

Aude aliquid dignum: dare something worthy. I try to approach teaching and learning as if they were the most worthy things I could do and help others do. I think it’s important to ask kids to do worthy work. I think it’s important that teachers dare to resist the standardization of education. I think it’s important and worthy that we talk about how to subvert the status quo in our primary and secondary schools so that learning matters to kids, their families, and their communities. So here it is:

Aude aliquid dignum

I made the image in Acorn. I tried to minimalize the sans-serif text’s presence on the page without making it illegible (I probably cut too much of the “g”). Then, while trying to stay away from the Dr. Manhattan symbol, I made a little hydrogen atom to frame the words, with the “e” inside the electron. Hydrogen is a pretty minimalist element, but the proton and electron are also the building blocks of everything else. Hydrogen can exist by itself, but atoms do great and terrible things together. We humans can do the same, inside and outside Minecraft, a game about building – and/or destroying – alone and/or in a community!

I put another atomic particle in the upper right-hand corner so that the eye would be drawn there in an attempt to connect the two white spaces with one another over distance, which made me think that maybe the electron (which wants to create a bond) is also little person or organism looking to the stars and wondering how to connect with another being over a vast distance. I think connecting is worth daring.

Minimalist TV/Movie Poster – 3 stars

I didn’t want to burn out on minimalism early this the week, so I picked this assignment and shelved the minimalist movie travel poster for now.

Richard Ayoade plays the character Moss on the British sitcom The IT Crowd. Moss’s hair is absolutely iconic.

I found a CC-licensed picture of a glorious, insanely detailed, embroidered Moss, brought it into SketchBook Pro, and traced over Moss’s hair and glasses. I used green in homage to the show’s pixelated, primitive CGI credit sequence. Then I went into Acorn to fill it in and clean-up white speckles left over in Moss’s hair and glasses.

Minimal Moss

DS106 Propaganda Posters – 3 stars

For this piece, I searched The Commons on Flickr for propaganda. I went into my search looking for an ad or poster about building a shelter. I wanted to make a visual pun on our Minecraft work. However, when I found this picture, I switched gears. I hate Creepers. I’m playing the ds106 server on survival mode right now, and the Creepers have not been kind. If you look at my stretch of the beach on the server (behind camp), you can see how much Creeper damage I’ve had to patch. Finding a way to rally against the Creepers was just what I needed to lift my spirits.

I grabbed a CC-licensed picture of some Creeper cosplay. I took a screen shot of the head and cut out the background in Acorn. Then I brought in the propaganda poster. I used the scale and perspective transformations to size, angle, and position the Creeper heads. Then I made the heads monochromatic and color-matched them to their bodies.

Beat the Creeper

Now I’m ready to go back on the sever. I hope someone will put this poster into a ds106 texture pack for Minecraft!

DS106, The Movie – 3 stars

#DontBlogNow starring Martha Burtis and Alan Levine. Somehow featuring the Bava, Timmmyboy, and Slaughterhouse 4. I did a lot of cutting, filling, and smudging in Acorn. I grabbed the movie poster here. I found Martha here and I found Alan here. I sepia-toned their faces, shrunk their heads, and then altered their saturation and brightness to help their faces better fit the gestalt of the photo in the poster.

#DontBlogNow

I love how different their expressions are, as if Martha has caught on to something that Alan is asking about again. “A serial killer in a red raincoat? Really? Was that a deliberate design decision? Where?” “Over-ay ere-thay, Alan-ay! Et’s-lay o-gay!”. Why someone snapped a photo of them at this moment I will never know.

I picked Don’t Look Now to avoid making a quick and easy visual pun about a movie I loved. I despise Don’t Look Now. I loathe that movie. I will never go to Venice. I refuse to look at myself passing on a boat. Forget it.

I will, however, spend hours remixing the film’s poster.

I just wish I was better at digital production – I really like the way the poster turned out, but I wanted it to be perfect, like my utter, unutterable, intangible, illogical contempt for this Don’t Look Now.

That’s it for today’s products. As I go further into the ds106 experience, I’m trying to stick with at least a few assignments per week that push me out of my comfort zone. I also want to balance the camp nature of camp with the profundity of the learning experience available to me here. I need to socialize more with my fellow campers, too.

I try to teach to what kids are doing in my classroom; in the same way, I’m learning to design what I discover instead of trying to design what I plan. It feels good.

The Year of the Chevrotain

First: congratulations to you all. I am glad to have been your teacher and I am glad to celebrate your successful rising-up from our school. Despite the small size of your class, each of you has had a significant, positive, and important impact on us, our community, and our school. That we are all here today after the good times and the challenging times means that we have learned from one another how to get along, how to understand one another, and how to help one another.

I, for one, would not be the teacher I am today without your help. You have all taken a chance on us; you have all risked telling us, in a bunch of different ways, what you need from school; you have all found ways to be patient with us and helped us find ways to be patient with you, and at the end of our three years together I can very honestly say that all of you have grown up beyond my wildest expectations. You have learned kindness to others and kindness to yourself, and I can see in you the incredible and clearly good people you are, you have been, and you will become. You have challenged me to do better, to be kinder, and to keep learning no matter what.

A couple of you like to walk around asking us, “What’s good? What’s good, bro?”

Here’s my answer: You are. You are good kids. Good people. Good students. Good problem-solvers. You may not have chosen all the problems we asked you to tackle. You may not have chosen all the problems that are out there in the world left to solve. But you have chosen to let go of anger; you have learned determination; you have learned that you can hold on to what’s right in tough situations.

Remember those things. You are good. You have learned. You have helped build a community of friends and caring adults who will stick with you as you build your futures. You can go ahead into life and look back for support without going backwards.

Keep going. Keep doing good. Keep being kind. Your success and happiness inspire us.

Congratulations and welcome to high school.

Thank you, Andrew Forgrave, for introducing me to Skincraft, and also for supporting the #ds106 Minecraft community.

In meager, but earnest thanks, I wanted to share out the custom skin I crafted:

A colorful, trans-human Minecraft skin

64x32

I started with a black and white spiral pattern on the face, and then worked on a flame-like gradient for the rest of the avatar’s head and hands. After that I tried to fill in a serviceable leather jacket before working on a textured pair of jeans and some flame shoes (favorite pair of shoes ever; thanks, @nowviskie!).

I thought the jacket looked drab, so I pixled-in a rainbow drip pattern on the back – inspired by a student’s t-shirt – and added an eye because why not?

I wanted detail without risking too much noise, as well as something vaguely trans-human.

Skincraft is a nifty little program in that it keeps track of what should go where for you – no more unintentionally squished faces on blocky biceps for me!

See you ’round camp!