Islington City Learning Centre - Easter Photoshop workshop

Dan and myself ran this workshop over a period of two full days at a very well equiped Islington City Learning Centre. We had around 15 students each day (Yr8,9 and 10), which given that it is a holiday was a good turn out. This workshop was a bit of an unchartered territory as we were not screenprinting (the IT room is squeeky clean!), but instead Anna, Dan and myself devised a plan involving rubbings, collaging, photographs and texture scanns as a resource materials. The overall concept to the workshop was to create Fantasy landscapes, using object, shapes and textures to create surrealist compositions.

First day was focused on getting the rubbings of found objects that we brought along, working only with graphite sticks on paper, from which they built a surreal landcape collage. We scanned some of those rubbings and got them working on the Photoshop to try and recreate on the computer what they had done previously. We also gave them as a resource images that Dan brought along, Max Earnst images (as an example) and some black and white unusual images (eg microscopic shapes, stencil like shapes etc). But they ended up using images in themselves rather then transforming them into something else. So after a lunch break (provided by ICLC, lovely ciabatta sandwiches :-) we recapped the idea, and asked them to only use rubbings or other abstract images to create landcsape, buildings etc. This worked much better and they started to get into it.
We started working only in Black & White and then introduced the colour, and we had to quite quickly work out the Hue/Saturation - click on the colorise box in order to bring colour into the black and white images.

For the second day we asked them to bring objects, such as domestic objects like cheese graters, forks (NOT knives!) or any other personal objects such as mobile phones - which is easy as they would have them anyways...They photographed those objects and incorporated them in their digital collage.
Towards the end of the 2nd day some of the pupils scanned or photographed images they needed and that worked well as they could tailor images to their own designs.

Overall it worked very well, and was enourmously enjoyable workshop to run. We impressed the big boss (from Islington gov that funded the project).
The challenge was to balance the use of Photoshop with other activities like rubbings and photographes, and to encourage them to really push their imagination and not go for the obvious objects and shapes. And of course the challenge of teaching the technical side of Photoshop with the creative freedom to play is always there! Great fun though!!!