For my next design assignment I chose a 3 star entitled Children’s Book Cover. The assignment was to recreate a children’s book cover using shapes. The best way to do this from what I read in other blogs was to use Paint. Which was good news for me because that’s what I usually use for my assignments. I decided to recreate Oh, the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Suess. I started my making different colored circles with the shape tool.
I thought these circles were too big so I went back and made smaller ones. It wasn’t till just now that I realized that it was more of a cone.
I then filled in the circles with the paint can and made a person out of shapes at the top. I then cut and pasted the words onto the picture. My roommate saw me working on this and said that it was really good, but personally I don’t think it was my best work and when I look at the cover, which I’m saving to the end to show, I don’t think I nailed the recreation, but I think given that we could only use shapes I think it’s pretty good. I think I could have done the circles a little more tilted and tried to encompasses the cone top better- however it would have been hard just using shapes.
“Create a children’s book cover using primarily cutting and pasting. Imagine you’re cutting shapes out of construction paper and gluing them onto another piece of paper. Except it doesn’t have to be paper. You can make a cover for a book that already exists, or make up your own. “
3.0 Stars
By the time I made it to this assignment, I was pretty much done messing with GIMP for the next ten years. Although I was starting to nail down some techniques, there are things right now that are just really, really frustrating. I decided to take a break from working with it since I was getting nowhere and had burned more time than I can afford, and this task was the perfect escape. Nothing is easier to work with for cut and paste than paint.
My first job was to pick a children’s book to design a cover for. I thought back to the books I enjoyed most during my childhood and what came back time and time again was Cat in the Hat. It’s one of the books I learned to read with for the very first time, and it’s the perfect cover to design with choppy cut-and-paste techniques. I knew I wanted to use construction paper texture to create the image, so I went and found images of different colored papers on google’s image search. I pasted them into the paint screen and adjusted the sizes and shapes to get the pieces I needed. I lined up the red pieces with blank breaks between them to make the hat and then positioned the black construction underneath to create the face. White paper was layered over to create eyes and whiskers, and a nose was made with a small bit of pink paper.
I cut out a rectangular section from the image and closed out paint. I opened a new window and pasted in a large piece of red construction paper. I layered the original image over it to create a paper bored that I thought would look really cool on a book for children. I went online and downloaded a new font to match the font used in Dr. Seuss books. I wrote in the title and that was it! I then skipped Flickr and uploaded the cover directly to this post!
So for this design assignment, I had to create a Children’s Book Cover (worth 3 stars). Spencer Scott’s character, Donnie Rawlen is an established writer so I thought this would be the perfect way to incorporate him with Lawrence. The assignment was to create a children’s book cover using primarily cutting and pasting. I downloaded a paint app for my mac and created this bad boy using that. I obviously had to do some drawing for the hair and faces but everything else was pasted. You’re probably wondering…how does this pertain to Lawrence? Well he is the main character in this book, of course. Donnie was inspired by his good friend Lawrence’s line of work that he decided to dedicate a book to him. But because Lawrence is in such a dangerous business, the main character’s name in the book was changed to protect his identity.
Now you also may be wondering…how the hell is this a children’s book??? Well it’s for educational purposes about guns and gun rights for the youth. It’s to show today’s youngsters that guns aren’t the cause of the problems in the world, it’s the people behind them pulling the trigger. (PSA: I have no stance on the gun rights debate, I am taking this side solely for the assignment purposes) The children of tomorrow need to understand that they are in control of what is in their hands…the object does not have a mind of it’s own.
I thought this was a really cool way to incorporate two characters together. At least, in my mind, it’s somewhat out of the box for my thinking.
Mencius once said, “Friendship is one mind in two bodies.” That’s true though, friendship is a good thing to have in life. Especially you can have so many awesome times with your friend, especially doing funny things like:
Anyways, Jay created a children’s book cover (3 stars) because he feels like writing a story to all the little kids of why making friends is important. Jay used paint to do this assignment for now to show what he’s going to create soon. Here is what he created:
Hope you guys like it! Would love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments below!
I decided to the Children’s Book Cover assignment worth 3 stars. As a kid there was one book that I would always have my Mom and Grammy read to me. It is a book that I will likely read to my own kids. This book is The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. It is a pretty sad book actually about a tree that will do anything for this young boy. The boy used to sit in the tree’s shade and swing from its branches but as he gets older he starts taking from the tree. He takes branches to build a home and he just keeps taking things from the tree until the tree becomes nothing more than a stump. The tree is sad and misses the boy and finally at the end young boy comes back as an old man sits on the stump.
To make the cover I ended up drawing most of the picture in paint. After drawing everything I put the photo into gimp cropped it a little bit and then added the title into the picture and the author’s name.
My favorite childhood book wasn’t the average one. I fell in love with the Rainbow Fish series. My mom and dad would read them to me until I learned how to read and then they had to sit through me reading it to them! I had drawn a picture of a new design, and then I remembered we were supposed to cut and paste to redesign it so I took some pictures and tried to make a story within the book cover. Placing was the key for me in making this assignment the best I could. I made the title slanted to appeal more to the eye, and the key character, Rainbow fish, is looking down at the things you would find in an ocean that are colorful and grab a child’s attention. It is staged almost as if he is happy to look at all the wonderful stuff he had just found. Hopefully that would be enough to get the kids to want to know the story of how he got there and what it was he found! I also added a blue tint, because it gives it an under water appearance, and seeing as how the book is about a fish’s adventures, there has to be water involved!
While browsing the design assingments for the ds106zone, my eyes lit up when I saw the childrens book cover assignment. Back in high school, my friends and I would debate theoretical physics at the lunch tables. We jokingly refered to these as being dumbed down to a five year old level of understanding and thought that would make a great book title. Well, here’s the chance.
I leapt into flickr and started browsing for creative commons licensed photos I could modify and use non commercially. I found a black hole photo and a photo of a lego space shuttle. I figured these would play perfectly towards my theme. What five year old doesn’t love space and legos? Ok…maybe I’m not the best judge…I’m a pretty big nerd…
This is also my first foray into the GIMP world. I wanted to branch out of my usual tools and play with some others. I didn’t find GIMP as intuitive as photoshop, but pretty close. It has a lot of the same power and is open source. That’s VERY cool…and a little disheartening since I’m a paying photoshop customer.
I resized the black hole photo as a background, extracted the space shuttle with a combination of the lasso and eraser tools and layered that on top. I adjusted the color of the shuttle to match the background a little better. Finally I added some text. I wanted to keep the Theoretical Physics part of the title square so I used a Sans Serif font. I also wanted to get some roundness in the “for the common five year old” part so that was Comic Sans MS.
Overall I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and I’m enjoying experimenting with different tools.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
#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.
Create a children’s book cover using primarily cutting and pasting. Imagine you’re cutting shapes out of construction paper and gluing them onto another piece of paper. Except it doesn’t have to be paper. You can make a cover for a book that already exists, or make up your own.
