Scratch- My Intro To Digital Art

Within the last two weeks, I have been introduced to Scratch. Scratch is a programming website developed by Mitchel Resnick and a group of other MIT scholars for the purpose of teaching people of all ages how to animate and create art with coding. (Click the picture below to see my Scratch profile!)

My Scratch Profile

Before I was introduced to Scratch, I had never done any kind of programming or animation, but now I have done both and created my first pieces of digital art. We started off last week with a more simple project focused on Sprites, or characters, and how to animate them to create a cohesive video in what we call the Scratch Dance Studio. This consisted of exploring previously made examples and playing with them, observing the coding and how it works, and remixing the dance party video to make it my own. At first, I struggled to make each individual figure move and to add music, but I kept playing with it until I figured it out and I'm rather proud of the results. (Click the picture below to see my first Scratch project!)

My Scratch Dance Project

On the other hand, this week was a much bigger challenge. Now, we had to create a project for the Scratch Dream Studio that explores one or more elements of storytelling or a narrative, such as setting, characters, and plot. Again, we started by exploring and playing with the example videos, but, this time, I had create my own, starting with nothing. I decided to focus on creating and introducing a character, but I had a hard time deciding how. Luckily, one of the example videos gave me a lot of inspiration concerning the coding and video itself, so I really only needed to focus on the design. It was hard work, but I managed to create a beautiful background with a fair bit of detail and even a few minor background characters, while still keeping the overall focus on my would-be main character. I am extremely pleased with how well it turned out and even more so by how much I learned about digital art in the process. (Click the picture below to see my second Scratch project!)

My Scratch Dream Project

Throughout both of these projects, I learned a lot about programming and coding to create digital art, skills that will be invaluable to myself as a future art teacher. We live in an age of technology, so it is extremely important to have the skills needed to create digital art so that I may someday teach my own students how to do so as well. Now, I look forward to expanding on these new skills and become the best art teacher I can be.