Published 11 December 2020
SSHL Digital ART Studio – Raising funds for digital tools in visual arts
We live in a visual, digital world. Our students are constantly online seeing professional digital images in playing games, social media, and film.
Beyond traditional methods, visual arts education today should also give students the skills to express themselves digitally.
– Improving student comprehension of visual communication and how they can create and communicate digitally is essential to a modern visual arts education, says Ulrika Lindblom who is an art teacher at SSHL.
Ulrika and her colleagues have, therefore, started SSHL Digital Art Studio, a project aimed at stimulating art creation, creativity, and giving students new opportunities to solve problems, in new ways:
Ulrika Lindblom, Arts Teacher at SSHL.
– We want to give our students the skills and confidence needed. Students that find drawing and painting with traditional tools like pencils, pens or brushes often thrive when given access to digital tools.
Preparing students for further studies
Meet SSHL student Agnessa Poluzhnikova from the boarding house Skoga, who is in her final year of the IB Diploma Programme, and has produced her final assessment project in Visual Art using digital tools. Also see a gallery of some of her work at the bottom of the article.
The project’s goal is to build a professional digital studio for the school’s visual arts department. New digital tools are needed to achieve this – for example Ipads with professional illustration applications that provide completely new opportunities for creative expression through sketching and working in layers with different artistic elements.
– Students of today will work in a digital world where they need to master digital tools, in all areas such as visual arts, design, and photography, Ulrika continues. We want to equip our graduates with the skills they need for higher education in fields like engineering, design or architecture.
Critical thinking in the digital world
Another aim of the project is to increase students’ comprehension of image manipulation and to open a pathway for more thorough critical thinking about what they see every day in the digital world. An upgraded digital studio will also contribute to giving our students professional presentation skills; something that they will benefit from in all subjects.
– A digital studio will give us the opportunity to offer more creative extracurricular activities at the school. We will be able to work with moving images, animation, and 3D modeling. We are really looking forward to our digital studio becoming a reality, Ulrika concludes.
One of Agnessas digital pieces of work:
