Using Photoshop to encourage students to seek new ways to render drawings from a photograph has proven to be a successful strategy in my art room. I have the students take a photo, then we open the image on Photoshop and apply a variety of filters to see how the image looks rendered in diffrent mediums. We discuss the aesthetic properties of different mediums and the overall gestalt of the image. Rustic pictures of nature tend to look good with the fresco filter. Geometric glass shapes may look best with the cutout filter. Students try out various filters until they find a look they like. We print the image and students use the appropriate medium to replicate the image on canvas or special papers.
The original image below was rendered using the conte, colored pencil and cutout filters in Photoshop.
