Exploring Environmental Issues Through Digital Landscape
Description:
Students will create a digital landscape focusing on the big idea of environmental issues. They will be shown examples of traditional landscape pictures and paintings and students will also be shown contemporary examples of landscape art with an emphasis on digitally altered landscapes. Two artists whose work will be focused on in the introduction to environmental issues and landscape art will be Agnes Denes and Chris Jordan. The photograph, Wheatfield- A Confrontation (1982), by Agnes Denes will be shown to give the students an idea of how a landscape image dealing with environmental issues can be composed. Then, Chris Jordan’s work will be shown to give the students an idea of how digitally manipulated images can be used to create a landscape that deals with environmental issues. His photograph, Plastic Bottles (2007), will be shown as one of the many examples of his work. Students will be asked to research environmental issues and contribute to a discussion in class on the topic. They will then select one environmental issue to focus on in order to create their own digital landscape. Students will use their knowledge of Photoshop and digitally manipulated images in order to create a landscape image that addresses an environmental issue that faces our world today. Students will be required to incorporate at least one picture that they have taken themselves in their final work, much like the two artists that we focused on in class do in their work. Students will then display their final work in class and prepare an artist statement explaining the issue they chose to focus on and how they digitally manipulated their landscapes in order to address that issue. Students will reflect on the effectiveness of their own work and the work of their peers in portraying an environmental issue through digital landscape.
Potential Activities:
-Students will be shown examples of landscape art throughout art history and will be asked to compare and contrast these works with contemporary examples of landscape art, focusing on landscape art that has been digitally manipulated in some way. Through class discussion, students will explore the question of what landscape art is and how to portray landscape through digital means.
-Students will research environmental issues and prepare 3 issues to share in a class discussion. Students will participate in a discussion about what environmental issues face our world today, and how they affect the landscape.
-Students will take pictures of varying landscapes that surround them. Students will be challenged to take photographs of landscape that show an environmental issue in some way. Students will bring 5 photographs to share in class (in digital format). Students will participate in a class discussion of what environmental issue each photograph might be focusing on and discuss the effectiveness of how that photograph addressed each issue. Students will begin to think about how environmental issues can be shown in a 2-D landscape format.
-Students will use at least one original photograph and any other digital media they choose in order to create a digital landscape using Photoshop. This landscape must address an environmental issue that the students have chosen to focus on.
-Students will display their digital landscapes in class and provide a written artist statement explaining the choices they made in their artwork. They will then participate in a class discussion and reflection of the effectiveness of their own work and the work of their peers in portraying an environmental issue through digitally manipulated landscape.
My Digital Landscape
My digital landscape was made to address the issue of urbanization and the impact it is having on our natural environment. All of the pictures I used to make my digital landscape are pictures that I have taken on trips that I have been on to various places around the United States and abroad, with the exception of the statue of liberty picture on the far right (although I have been to New York, I didn’t have a good enough picture of the Statue of Liberty to use). The pictures that I have put together have a point in which they connect to the following/previous picture, whether it be horizon lines matching up or objects in the foreground lining up. They progress from left to right, the farthest left being the most untouched landscape, free of human impact, and the far right being a heavily influenced landscape. This progression is meant to show the effect our inhabitance has on the natural landscape and our sense of entitlement to the land that we live on. The final picture, the Statue of Liberty, is used in this context to show the arrogance with which we develop and urbanize the world we live in. Being in New York City, the most developed city in the United States, the Statue of Liberty stands proud and unforgiving of the disruption the city causes to the natural environment that once existed there.
I was able to put these landscape pictures together using the rectangular marquee tool to select a part of a landscape picture that I wanted to use from a different tab in Photoshop, and copying and pasting that section onto a new layer in my digital landscape document. I would then use the free transform tool and the shift key to resize the picture segments to fit the canvas size, and then I would use the free transform tool without the shift key to line up the horizon lines or objects in the different pictures to create continuity across the landscape. I used multiple layers and the “merge layers” option in order to group the different landscape segments together once I felt satisfied with how they were interacting with one another. The Statue of Liberty picture that I used was found on the internet and then, using the same method as stated above, I took a segment of the picture and lined it up with the other landscape pictures that I already had in my digital landscape document. I used the “image size” tab in order to make all of my pictures 300 pixels and I used the “canvas size” tab in order to make my final landscape look more like a panorama than just a regular format picture. I feel that the panorama format provides more of a sense of progression than just a regular format landscape would.