picoDoodler - quick draw artist!

What can you do with just 10K? The site "10K Apart" sponsors a competition to see who can create the most interesting webapps, with the smallest footprint. These apps run in your browser window and let you play games, doodle, look up stuff, calculate, run animations, etc. One I like is quick draw app called PicoDoodler. This basic draw program lets you select pen size and colour, erase mistakes and save the image to your desktop, and it's only 4.97K - wow!  Perfect for a quick little sketch to show off an idea or illustrate a concept. Launch it is a sec, draw your image, and move on.

Drawing and Painting in the Browser window

Summer is almost here, and you may have a few blocks of time to cover in a computer lab before it's all over!  Why not give your students a session with one of these "in browser" drawing/painting sites. Students can be creative and then save their art work for posting on a class site, or for printing as refrigerator art!

Artpad

http://artpad.art.com/artpad/painter/

Sketchy

http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/#sketchy

Crayola

http://www.crayola.com/coloring_application/index.cfm

Be an Artist: Create your own still life

I was at a meeting with some Elementary Computer teachers in my district, looking at some web-based drawing programs, and I mentioned the "Still Life" Painter on the US National Gallery of Art site. If you haven't seen it, it is worth a visit.

While it can be a little slow to load (depending on your connection), it's great fun. Students can view a "typical" still life composition and then take a turn creating their own, using the various elements provided. You can choose the table, the drape, the background, the fruit, the bowls and additional elements. Then you can add a "paint" effect to personalize your creation. The interface allows the student to create 8 different versions and hold them in "frames" along the right side of the screen (activated by the "look" button.)

From the site:

[Students] can explore spatial arrangement, perspective, proportion, and balance while creating engaging, interactive still life compositions that mix everyday objects with elements borrowed from famous works of art.

While there is a print feature, it seemed a little buggy, so I just used SHIFT+APPLE+4 on my Mac to snap png images of my work. The finished products can be viewed in Preview as a slide show.

http://www.nga.gov/kids/zone/stilllife.htm