VisualAssignments334 – Assignment Bank

Scooter Pooter on a Paris Street on a Rainy Day

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Visual Assignment #1

When I saw this assignment, I just knew I had to do it. If you couldn’t tell already, my love for orange cats is out of this world. For some reason, every orange cat in the world seems to come to my house and knows that we will take them in. To get a little bit of background information on Scooter, my YouTube video gives a short introduction of the fat boy. But as you can see, Scooter is definitely not starving, so he was perfect for this assignment. I wasn’t sure which photo or painting I was going to use for this assignment. I looked through the website FatCatArt, and got inspiration. I immediately knew which photo of my cat/painting I was going to use. Which it’s kind of funny, because where I placed Scooter in the painting, it looks as if the people walking in the painting are actually looking at him and wondering “what is this fat, orange cat doing on a Paris Street in the rain?” And if you watch my YouTube video you’ll know he literally scratches the kitchen cabinets to get food, so he’s gonna end up being on a Paris Street in the rain if he keeps at it (sarcasm of course).

As for the process I began by using my trusty Picsart app to cutout my cat in the original photo. I then used the painting Paris Street; Rainy Day, and cut out one of the umbrellas in the photo so my cat could hold one. I placed Scooter’s cut out over the photo and placed the umbrella in his hand. I messed around with the effects on Picsart so I could better blend my cat into the painting. And that’s it. Pretty simple, yet pretty extraordinary if I do say so myself.

I also wanted to include the Live Photo of Scooter, because it’s hilarious. (Also we did get him unstuck, just had to take a picture first).

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fat cats DO make everything better

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I own one of the chubbiest cats ever and it’s the perfect look for him, so when I saw this assignment in the assignment bank, I knew I had to try it. When I realized I’m close friends with the person who created the assignment, it just solidified my decision. I didn’t have a whole lot of luck making the picture blend in, unfortunately, but I had a lot of fun finding a painting to use and a cat to insert into it.

This portrait is titled “Annunciation” and is by Leonardo da Vinci (although I cut it in half). This cat is just a cat. I actually used Adobe Photoshop’s online editor, which I know now was a mistake. I’ve been having much better luck with GIMP’s photo editing tools. I cut the cat out of its own picture, and pasted it onto the painting by da Vinci. I adjusted the filter to try to make the cat fit in more with the reds and browns in the image, but the closest I could get was that funky purple-ish color. The next step was to try softening the image, hoping that it would make the picture of the cat less realistic. The final touch was attempting to burn the edges of the cat in an effort to do the same thing, but it still didn’t come out looking how I had wanted it too. I feel REALLY silly but when I created this I didn’t realize GIMP had photo editing options, so I didn’t think to use it. Big mistake.

That being said, the cat does make this painting look funnier and I’m a fan of the assignment!

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“Fat Cats Make Art Better” Alexandre Cabanel’s “Fallen Angel”- 2 Stars

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Ohhh those Fat Cats. They are something else. Funny, adorable, obese… Anyways, I decided to throw my hand in at trying this assignment. I started by uploading both photos into photoshop: 1) the Alexandre Cabanel work of art, 2) the fat cat picture.
I left the piece of art as it was, and went right to the fat cat picture. I went to the lasso tool and selected the magnetic lasso. After I did this, I went around the fat cat and outlined him as carefully as I cut. I then copied and then cut him out of the picture. After doing this step I went ahead and pasted him into the art piece. After realizing that he was WAY too big for the painting (not trying to be funny), I went back and reduced the image size in the original fat cat photo and did this until I was happy. After this I experimented with arbitrary rotation of the cat so that he would look good on the man’s knee in the painting. Basically this was all I did.
My motivation in doing this was to show that I was not afraid to try something that I was not exactly “comfortable” with. So I went ahead and found a tutorial that showed me how to cut figures out of a photo:

… and I used this to help me extract the cat from the photo.
I suggest that people comment on this or my other work, I’d really appreciate it DS106! Thanks!

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Fat Cats Make Better Art History Assignments

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Originally posted in my summer teaching with technology course, but it’s a new fat cat so I had to get it in the ds106 stream!

Today we are going to play with digital storytelling as a tool for teaching and learning. In one of Alan Levine’s talks about digital storytelling, he included a slide quoting Ruben Puentedura on the value of learning through stories :

One of the best ways to understand something is to create a story around it.

If you think about it, a traditional lecture is a storytelling technique that faculty are very, very comfortable with in the classroom. Sometimes they get crazy and even include presentation slides! and videos! But most faculty don’t ask students to create stories other than traditional papers, and the occasional presentation. And even less frequently do they expect you to focus on being a compelling storyteller. If that were the case, then faculty and students would need to spend much more time thinking about creative storytelling techniques in the context of presenting concepts and content. What would that mean? Less content coverage for the sake of developing richer engagement with an audience?

We’re going to look at the digital storytelling community ds106 for innovative storytelling ideas by looking through their collaboratively built assignment bank and the abundant examples of work made by community members.

The above image was made for one of the many ds106 assignments in the visual assignments category – Fat Cats Make Better Art. Here’s the description of what to do:

Using this site: http://fatcatart.ru/category/klassy-ka/ as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat.

Most of all, enjoy! :0) And remember, fat cats make art better.

I chose to modify the painting ?Madonna in Glory with Seraphim by Botticelli with a picture of my cat Peter. So you might call this Madonna in Glory with Peter the Cat. I used Photoshop to do my layering and editing of the two images.

But what’s the point of the assignment, other than hopefully to get a laugh out of an art history lolcat. There’s definitely a lot of digital image manipulation skills learned in the process of creating the image, that’s fairly obvious. And if it’s your first time playing with photo editing/manipulation tools then that’s a big deal.

Less obvious though is the study of the details of the painting that happens while trying to place your cat compellingly and convincingly. In photo editing applications it’s really easy to zoom in and focus on the details of the image while editing. Here’s an example:

I started to notice the expressions of the cerubs which were definitely not smiling despite that they are in the presence of a mother holding her heathy baby, normally a celebratory event. So why the sadness and expressions of concern? Because it’s the baby Jesus, and being little angels, they know he’s going to have to be killed. And now that my cat is in that position, have I predestined his furry future?

So the ds106 assignments are lots of fun and obviously encourage the use of digital tools, but there’s a method to meme madness – fostering understanding through storytelling.

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Visual Assignment: Portrait of a Gentle Cat Feeder

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Fat Cats Make Art Better: Using this site: http://fatcatart.ru/category/klassy-ka/ as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat.

"I hope you have milk in that bowl."

I’m a little down in the dumps lately, and thought a DS106 assignment might make me feel better. Well it did. I took “Portrait of a Gentlewoman” by Antonio da Correggio (who I think is too old to fight me over copyright) and pasted the picture of a fat cat begging for food on top of it. The question then becomes not, “What’s with the bowl,” but rather, “What’s in the bowl?”

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Fat Cat Makes Art Better

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Using this site: http://fatcatart.ru/category/klassy-ka/ as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat.

Most of all, enjoy! :0) And remember, fat cats make art better.

This was my first completed assignment for ds106, i was very pround until I compared my work to others. I would do this again this was very fun. I looked up famous painting and stumbled into this art work Whistler’s Mother.

Whistler’s Mother is the truncated name for James McNeill Whistler’s very famous portrait originally known as Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother. Painted in 1871, it’s one of the few American pieces on this list – although it is owned by a Parisian museum and therefore rarely seen in the states.

then I found a fat cat on google

I place the cat on the lap, I felt like something belonged on her lap. I feel that I should have change the image of that cat more so it could blend in more. I feel that I spend the most time on this photo. This assignment is worth two stars **.

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Fat Cats in Classic Art “Scream”

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Fat Cats make Art better

The original painting is called “Screamed” painting by Edvard Munch around the early 1900′s. I used a series of fat cats but I felt this one suits this classical art best even though his weight isn’t emphasized as much(lol). I used Photoshop to combine the two layers. First I cropped out the cat, copied him on the painting, and rotated his head a little and quite frankly I think it came out perfect.

This Link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream) gives a little detail of the painting and what’s going on, which helped me pick out the cat that fits the painting the best. Also learning how to crop a photo in Photoshop is easy. I learned a couple years ago by using Youtube, and currently finding new techniques.

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Surreal and Kind of Cute.

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Visual Assignment: Fat Cats make Art Better

Unbelievably, I haven’t written any DS106 blog post for this section. After submitting reports and essays for other classes, I sort of went into short hibernation. Although, I have been thinking about this and that in my head starting from Neuromancer to Web 2.0 and the future of cyberspace. Was I slacking off? Kind of. Well, today I decided to be part of the Fat Cat craze and share my piece.

I don’t reckon people know that I was an AP Art student back in my high school years. The art teacher I had constantly insisted that I should be a visual art critic, and I was and I am still interested in art history and philosophy. Yet, I chose to pursue another field of art, and thus, going through a bit of a rough ride I ended up being here in Temple. As I’m writing this I feel like I need to listen to the ballad “Dream On”. And speaking of dreams, the classical art piece I used for the assignment is one of the notable works of the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali, who portrays dream images and landscapes. I’m talking about a different definition of dream, but anyway, the title of the piece is “The Persistence of Memory”.

This is my first attempt at creating an image using Pixlr which Scott recommended in the CIS blog on Monday. The online photo editor is quite easy to maneuver. I used GIMP to manipulate images for The Pioneer section and it took me time to figure things out. So Pixlr is a nice discovery. Thanks for recommending it Scott.

To tell the truth, there is not much to comment on the process. My initial idea was to place a cat in some wintry ukiyo-e, but I was unsuccessful in finding any that are usable. I abandoned the idea and turned towards western art. Dali was an easier piece to work on, because of the surreal nature it had. Placing a ginormous cat in the scenery would look just fine. Personally, I think at least half of the burden was on researching images for the process.

I love cats (or most smaller mammals) and lived near them all my life, despite the allergy I supposedly have. If you got interested, try this assignment and join the Fat Cat craze!

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Fat Cats on a Plank

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Assignment: Annie Belle has come up with one of the more bizarre, wacky and exciting ds106 assignments in recent memory with: Fat Cats Make Art Better . It’s hard to imagine anyone not being drawn into an assignment described in such a way:

Using this site: http://fatcatart.ru/category/klassy-ka/ as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat.

I first saw this assignment early last week. Last time I checked, I noticed sixteen submissions already. If I’m quick in writing this post, this hybrid – mash-up version will be number seventeen. For inspiration, you might want check some of these recent contributions:

Norm’s The Fat Cat Has Landed
Emily’s Fat Cat American Gothic
Some guy with too many dogs in this fight came up with Fat Cats Playing Poker with Dogs

What was done, what was learned: It’s exciting to see the various angles and approaches people put in to completing such an assignment. We’re all coming to it with the same basic assignment description and look at the rich and surprising variety that results. And what do we learn from doing such an assignment?

For me, I learned a bit more about how to use Pixlr. It is now my preferred web-based image editor. In fact, I’d probably choose it over GIMP for most projects so long as I’m connected to the net.

I also learned about an interesting historical character. The engraving upon which the two different types of fat cats were placed was done by a seventeenth century German librarian named Adam Olearius. The name of the original work is called Pleasure Wheel, which according to Cerebral Boinkfest is one of the earliest depictions of what we now call a Ferris Wheel. I found the image through some Google image search using the word engraving and some other term which I can’t recall.

Recently, as mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve become interested in colorizing old time drawings and engravings. I hope to eventually devise a new ds106 assignment in which we find such an image, colorize it and come up with some interesting story based on the the associative trails formed through interrogating the artifact.

For me, reading about Olearius, his journey to Russia and Persia as the secretary to an embassy sent by the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp (Frederick III) in 1634-35, and his duties as the keeper of the Cabinet of Curiosities was a fanciful escape into history and imagination. So let me try to briefly summarize what I think this means and why it matters.

Had I not taken the challenge to try this Fat Cats assignment, I’d not find myself where I now do. That is, totally excited by how tightly this idea of some old rich geezer from a few hundred years ago hiring some smart guy to be his librarian to build a collection of everything known in the world. Even back then, there was the desire to assemble, index and present collected knowledge. I’d never known of a Cabinet of Curiosities until a few hours ago. Now I have new metaphor to help me try to make sense of this connection between me, cyberspace and society. I’m sure I’m not the first to put this idea forward, but I would like to consider that the Net is our civilization’s Cabinet of Curiosities. To me that is very deep and powerful and gives this particular assignment great personal value.