Art for The Heart: Coding & Art Intersect in Spark Studio

The 9th grade Digital Design has recently been working on curating their artwork and finding their favorite work to share for the upcoming show, Art for The Heart at Convent & Stuart Hall. The students have gotten into using some powerful tools including Adobe Illustrator and TinkerCad to design before taking these design to our laser cutters and 3D printers to make their ideas a reality.

Many have had great success using an exciting new function in TinkerCad that allows them to create their own unique shapes by writing code that includes loops. Developing a basic understanding of a loop and then seeing it execute step by step is an excellent feature in terms of allowing students to grasp what a loop is and how it works. Above Matthew Lim's artwork, Swirling Cynosure, is pictured. Matthew says, "I like how I was able to repeat and rotate a movement and was able to create such a cool product."

Several students have also used TinkerCad to make light boxes with holes in them based on a theme of their choice. This allows students to be constantly thinking about their creations as both an additive and subtractive effort with some shapes acting as holes removed from the box while others acting as additions to the box such as the gold box with the handle pictured below which was 3D printed on a metallic gold filament.

Other students have used Adobe Illustrator to make a lightbox based on a theme in similar fashion while learning how interlocking parts can take their work from 2D to 3D. The pac man lightbox by Kailer Tom (pictured above) is an excellent example of how students have come to use their imaginations and interests to create meaningful and striking artwork.

Several students also used Adobe Illustrator to create 3 layer designs each with a background, a middle ground and a foreground which they then glue together. The simplicity of each layer is contrasted by the complexity of empty space for other layers to show and the ability to picture this when designing each of the 3 layers. Zeke Noveshen's island scene with surfboards, palm trees and a mountain is picture above as well as Ronnie Ottaway's design Paradise Falls based on the scene from the movie "Up". 

Below are the works pictured together. Stop by the display in the Syufy building to check out the imaginative applications our 9th grade Students have used for their artwork!