Tonight I've been playing around with some mosaic curriculum ideas. As I begin to write mosaic curriculum for the Fellowship my mind is churning with ideas. I know I want to write some traditional project ideas and some digital ideas...and I want to create some project ideas that are tradigital, which is a combination of traditional and digital art. I stumbled across a wonderful app called Mazaika that is used to make digital photo mosaics. I can tell WE are going to become good friends. This app lets you use your own pics, hundreds or thousands of them, to create a mosaic of just ONE of your chosen photographs that you use for a base or a source. Ok! I just love this app!!! Tonight in just a few minutes...
...I took one of my school photos and used Mazaika's own photos, I chose paintings, and made a mosaic of my picture. This is just the beginning! This is going to develop into something massively cool. I'll keep you posted! Also, there is another app called Click 2 Crop that you can use to quickly crop your own photos to use. Of course, you may have to crop hundreds or thousands, depending on how creative you want to be. But, as a regular Photoshop user, the beauty of Click 2 Crop is there is much less "clicking" to simply crop one picture than in Photoshop...so it saves your fingers some work and also saves time. Supposedly there is a "free" version of Click 2 Crop, but I couldn't find it so I had to buy mine. I'm not exactly sure how I will use this newly found digital mosaic making app, but some ideas come to mind. Of course, I can take key photos I take in Istanbul and mosaic them with the "many" photos I take at each location. For example, I can take a photo of the Sea of Marmara and then "fill" the mosaic with hundreds of pictures I take of various parts of the sea, restaurants along the shores, etc. And wouldn't it be just so cool to take a famous mosaic image from the Hagia Sophia and then fill is with pictures I take of my daughter and myself in Istanbul or other images? Many, many, many ideas. Now, to think how students can use this project idea as part of a unit or lesson. That's where it gets crazy. They could go on a photo safari around the school, taking photos of friends, or architectural elements of the school building and then import them into an image of the exterior of the school, or the principal's face, or the school mascot, and so on. We could take every single student photograph and put them into a source photo. For a tradigital mosaic, students could all make a painting, we could photograph the paintings, and then input all of these images into one source photo. Of course, we know the ultimate plan will be much more sophisticated than this! How do I know that? Because tonight I won't sleep all night long because I'll be thinking of ideas. It's been one hour since I discovered Mazaika! Here's my first photo mosaic. I'm going to post it here so it can easily be referenced when later on we see the incredible projects that will be made using this application. I know they will be incredible, remember, because I'm not sleeping tonight thinking of them?!! Remember, this mosaic was made from Mazaika's stock images. Future ones will be made with my own images! I can already tell a key component of this project is using a base or source image that has significant areas of lights and darks. Enjoy using it! If you think of any good ideas email them to me at earthshakingT@gmail.com! |
| Above: The mosaic I just made using Mazaika. Below: The original source photo for the mosaic. |
