Beautiful Curves – fun drawing tool
Beautiful Curves is a cute little drawing application, creating almost organic-looking artwork. According to its creator “Beautiful curves simulates that little bit of randomness in life, where you never know whats going to happen next.”
It’s a fun application, which would work on your interactive whiteboard.
Bembo’s Zoo – fun with fonts
Just a quick link to a website that might be of interest to primary/elementary teachers. Bembo’s Zoo is based on the book by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich. The idea behind the site is to use a font called Bembo to create 26 different animals, one for each letter of the alphabet.
So for the letter “A,” the letters that make up the word “antelope” are manipulated to form the creature’s outline. Similar things are done for “bison” and “crab,” and so on all the way through to “yak” and “zebra.”
On the IWB you could use with the screen capture tool and see if the students can work out the word from the animal. Or use it to inspire their own creations.
Check it out at : http://www.bemboszoo.com/
Read More10 Great Art resources for your Interactive Whiteboard
With the right software an interactive whiteboard can become a massive graphics tablet – it is a very different drawing experience to using a mouse. Here are 10 great websites that all Art teachers should have bookmarked. Most are free online drawing packages, but one or two a slightly different, but still worth exploring. Enjoy!
1. Aviary : http://www.aviary.com/ and also http://www.aviaryeducation.com/ An excellent free suite of tools for image editing – painting, vector and more. Also includes a sound editor thats worth investigating. There’s a regular version of Aviary, but now an educational version too.
2. Odosketch : http://sketch.odopod.com/
A very simple sketch package. Quite neat effect, a bit like using watercolours in a sketch book.
3. Sketchpad : http://mugtug.com/sketchpad/
Sketchpad is quite a fun paint package that works in your browser. All the basic tools you’d expect are here.
4. Google Art Project : http://www.googleartproject.com/
The Google Art Project is basically applying the Google Street View idea to the world’s art galleries. Visit some of the greatest galleries in the world and explore their paintings without leaving your classroom. Well worth a look.
An oldie but a goodie. Paint in the style of Jackson Pollock, but without the mess. Works great on an interactive whiteboard. Click to change colour.
6. Bomomo : http://bomomo.com/
Bomomo is still a favourite of mine. Each “brush” creates some very abstract effects as you move your mouse across the page.
One for the younger students – choose from a variety of crayons and felt-tip pens.
8. SumoPaint : http://www.sumopaint.com/
A very impressive, full-featured paint package. Lots of great features and it’s free. A paid version with extra features also available.
9. Moodstream : http://moodstream.gettyimages.com/
This is not a drawing program, Moodstream mixes images, movies and sounds to help the creative juices flow. Is hard to describe, but worth a look. Play with the sliders to suit your mood and see what turns up. Make sure your sound is on.
10. Graffiti Creator : http://graffiticreator.net/
This is a free, online flash application which allow you to design your own name or logotype in graffiti-style. TGC comes with several fonts from throwups to bubble letters to wildstyles. The program also have an array of different tools that will help you further enhance your design. Great for designing fun titles for presentations too.
What do think of these resources? Got another one you want to share? Let me know in the comments!
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Smarthistory – a multimedia art textbook
Smarthistory.org is a free, not-for-profit, multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement for the traditional art history textbook. It “uses multimedia to deliver unscripted conversations between art historians about the history of art.” The site contains audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images.
It’s a very impressive resource – and I am sure Art teachers will find some very useful stuff here.
Check out Smart history at http://www.smarthistory.org and let me know what you think of it in the comments section.
Thanks to Lisa Dubernard (@onboardlearning) for the link
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Free Logo Creation Tools
Here are three websites that let students create logos to use in design projects.
Online Logo Maker : http://www.onlinelogomaker.com/applet/logomaker/
LogoEase : http://www.logoease.com/LogoEase.aspx
LogoMaker : http://logomaker.com/
Each one lets you choose from ready made logos/shapes and then change and tweak the various components and colours and add your own text.
LogoEase and LogoMaker want you to register to get features such as saving – but you could bypass the need for this by screen grabbing the finished logos and pasting them into other drawing software. Online Logo Maker will let you download the logo as a png file without the need for registering.
All three use Flash so they are not suitable for use on iPads.
The BBC ‘Your Paintings’ Art Project
Here’s a very interesting website for Art teachers or anyone interested in art. The BBC has announced the public beta launch of a new initiative to bring the UK’s entire collection of oil paintings to the Internet for the first time. It’s called Your Paintings.
Even if you’re an art-lover and have trawled the length and breadth of the country’s galleries and museums, there’s still a good chance that thousands of paintings have escaped your eyes. The project has already collected 63,000 paintings and they are aiming to get all 200,000 in the UK.
The BBC has now partnered with the Public Catalogue Foundation and hundreds of galleries and collections across the country. The collection will be presented in Your Paintings, a dedicated section on the BBC’s website, and they will be made available to view by anyone, anytime, for free.
The BBC is enlisting the help of the public to crowdsource the mapping of the content of the paintings, with a Your Paintings Tagger.
Find out more at : http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings
Art teachers – this site will let you search by artist, by theme or by collection. It’s an excellent resource already, and will obviously grow over time. Well worth bookmarking.
Related site : Don’t forget the excellent Google Art Project too.
Read MorePsykopaint
Here’s another site to add to my list of excellent online paint packages. Psykopaint has been created “as a new tool to enable users to express their creativity with a mimimum of knowledge and skills”. It lets you paint over the top of an existing image using a variety of different tools. A slider will let you reveal the image underneath. Or you can just start with a blank canvas.
It’s great fun and well worth taking a look. http://www.psykopaint.com
Thanks to Tim Rylands for making me aware of this site via his blog.
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Draw with ScribblerToo
A very quick post for a Friday to link to another online drawing application – ScribblerToo.
I like the slightly abstract way it joins up lines if you get them close to another one. This would be really fun on an interactive whiteboard.
Check out some of the other sites listed down the left hand side of the page. There are some other interesting ones there, such as this Snowflake Maker and string spinner.
For other drawing packages, check out: 12 Art Resources for your IWB
Read MoreThe Amazing Google Art Project
Today Google unveiled the Art Project, a unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.
Basically its Google Street view inside various art museums. You can move around the halls and explore all the artwork in detail.
Over the last 18 months Google has worked with 17 art museums including, Altes Nationalgalerie, The Freer Gallery of Art Smithsonian, National Gallery (London), The Frick Collection, Gemäldegalerie, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Museo Reina Sofia, Museo Thyseen – Bornemisza, Museum Kampa, Palace of Versailles, Rijksmuseum, The State Hermitage Museum, State Tretyakov Gallery, Tate, Uffizi and Van Gogh Museum.
The results of this partnership, which can be explored at www.googleartproject.com involved taking a selection of super high resolution images of famous artworks, as well as collating more than a thousand other images into one place. It also included building 360 degree tours of individual galleries using Street View ‘indoor’ technology.
With this unique project, anyone anywhere in the world will be able to learn about the history and artists behind a huge number of works, at the click of a mouse.
Each of the museums has worked in extensive collaboration with Google, providing expertise and guidance on every step of the project, from choosing which collections to feature; to advising on the best angle to capture photos; to what kind of information should accompany the artwork.
Works of art included in the project range from Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ to Chris Ofili’s ‘No Woman, No Cry’, Cezanne’s post impressionist works to Byzantine iconography. From the ceilings of Versailles to ancient Egyptian temples, a collection of Whistlers to Rembrandts all over the globe. In total, 486 artists from around the world have been included.
Here’s a video that explains more:
This is a fantastic resource for Art teachers. You could explore museums before going on school trips there. Plus explore ones you could never hope to take a trip to! A fantastic resource for any interactive whiteboard!
Visit it now at : http://www.googleartproject.com/
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About Me
Danny Nicholson : Educator, Science teacher, ICT Consultant, PGCE lecturer, Author and Web2.0 / SMART Masters/ Interactive Whiteboard Trainer. Contact me for any training requests. 
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