February 28, 2005
Express Yourself!
Welcome back to the Club! Hope everyone had a great vacation.
Today we will spend most of club time thinking about how we can use art to express our uniqueness. Explore making or finding art for your webpages using some of the online creation tools linked from the club's links page or on this page. A fun place to start is by making an Avatar.
First, please make a Name Card. Write your name on one of the cards. You can illustrate the card too, if you want. Save this card, it will help me learn all your names.
Second, lets make an Electronic Name Card or "Avatar"
Avatars are the name that has been given to the small graphics that represent people online. People use these on Bulletin Boards, or in online role playing games. Sometimes they are cartoons, or they might be a picture of an animal, flower or plant or your favorite sport. Maybe it's your autograph or tag. Maybe it's something you haven't even thought of yet. There really are no rules. Perhaps you want to draw your avatar by hand and scan it in (I can take pictures of anything you want to save for the web).
Cool Places to Get Started:
There are aleady a bunch of great online art making sites on our links page. Look under Explore Art. Or, try making something in Painter and saving it as a .jpg. Avatars are usually small, between 50 pixels square and 100 pixels square, make yours bigger if you want, especially if it is going at the top of your web page.
Portrait Illustration Maker
Anime-style portrait avatar creator from Japan.
Make sure you save the picture
(right click on the picture and select "save picture as" and save that).
Here's one I made of me (with my cat).
With the Portrait Avatar Maker
You can make avatars with little bodies and props
Punky Avatar Maker
Punk/graffiti-style text and shape avatars. This site also features BlinkieMakers, for making little animated icons! You might want to use something like these on your pages.
Use the Cool Text Logo Generator to make all sorts of text graphics. Try playing with your name!
Fractus, is a website that features patterned button icons made from Fractals. You can use these on your site too. There are also some cool 360° panoramas here. You can explore Fractals at CoolMath4Kids
Or, take a look at these: Zeldman's Free Icons Gallery (mostly weird little portraits). Zeldman is a well-known web designer but he lets people use these on their sites for free.
What about combining some of these things into you own original logo?
At most of these sites, you can save your icon by choosing "save as" and saving it to your local folder. You want to save it as either a .jpg or a .gif file. You can open these in Painter and play with them some more, or combine different things. Some sites have other instructions on how to save your pictures. If you need to mail it and don't have an email address, use the somerville21@gmail.com address. If there is no way to save what you have created, use "print scrn" to save it to your computer, then open it in Painter, select "paste" to paste the image, crop it, and save it.
Posted by Eleanor Ramsay at 10:27 AM