Teaching Sculpture with Ipods

As part of a series of articles that I have written for mobile phone apps , such as for my classroom set of Ipods and my own teacher Ipad, I have been thinking about other alternative digital ways to teach art to my students. The great tech specialist Sean Junkins introduced me to the Sculpt Master app , which you can download on the ITunes store here.

I purchased the free version of Sculpt Master for my Ipad for about four dollars and noticed how I could now teach students the basics of subtractive and additive processes in sculpting, but also give the students a sense of creating a three dimensional representation of a gargoyle by smearing their fingertips across the screen.

Other features of the free version allowed me to basically add more clay by building a false sense of depth on this model, but other buttons where I can add a form of water to create reliefs in a clay background. I also felt that this app could be a great alternative to glazing and painting sculptures with the students, as glazing can be expensive and time consuming, but now they can easily add color with wide strokes or in fine detail by adjusting the brush size in the app.

One of the major downfalls of the free version is being able to share the work that you created, such as easily uploading to a linked dropbox account. Junkins was again able to assist me by downloading the full version on the class set of Ipods. I combined this with the fact that I wanted to take the finished sculptures and then insert the three dimensional image into the open sourced program, Gimp.

The students did have a hard time trying to sort through the class folder of generic sculptmaster file names, and it is still frustrating to see how much difficulty that they have through basic file navigation, file types and directories of folders where they have to find their saved work. Once they were able to open the snapshot of their gargoyle sculpture, they continued to cut, paste and layer other examples architecture, illuminated manuscripts, and tapestries until they had a full medieval themed collage.

Even though the Ipods covered the beginning half of this assignment, I would like to use the Ipod devices through other various aspects of the project next time. I would have the students go on a web quest using the Ipod's Safari , have them share ideas and text them back and forth to one another using Bump . You could also import a series of snapshot images, and import the gallery into another great Ipod app - Animation Creator . In fact, my students had just completed a previous Ipod project where they created animations and uploading directly to You Tube, which I have posted on my School Tube account.

Finally, another app that can use images would be Storypages . Once on the internet, the students can save images of gargoyles and sculptures, such as on the Notre Dame Cathedral. Those images could then be imported into the ­­­­­­­­­­­­Storypages, so that students can draw over the saved image, and then delete the original photograph, leaving only a line drawing which can be saved as a practice contour exercise or a rough draft in the planning of their sculpture. These are but a few ideas of the possibilities with these apps in your classroom, as the mobile learning is something that the students are so accustomed to, to begin with anyways. So don't fight it, embrace it.

References:
Ipad's Listing of Apps