Digital Learning Commons: Animated Paintings: An Art Appreciation Coding/Research Project for 4th Grade: How To

Click the green flag. Find information about the painting and the audio on the project page here: York Harbor, Coast of Maine

MUSEO

MUSEO
Museo is a visual search engine that connects you with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rijksmuseum, the Harvard Art Museums, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library Digital Collectionmore to come! Images you find here are typically free to use, but please check with the source institution for more specifics.

STEPS:

1. Use https://museo.app/ or another tool to find a piece of art that is free to use and share. It may be in the public domain, or it may be free to use with attribution. There are many reasons you identify with a piece of art. Perhaps it's a landscape of a place you have visited or by an artist you admire. You can select art in a medium you would like to explore: watercolor, for example. Use the screenshot, erase, animate method to make your selection come to life.

2. Design the animation to reflect something about the work of art. In this example, I tried to create realism by bringing the sounds of the sea to life and by making the boat move. You can create a simple sketch storyboard to plan your animation.

To create this animation, I took a screenshot of the boat, erased part of the sail using costume editing. I rounded the corners of the screen shot using the eraser tool. The painting did not fill the backdrop, so I used the color picker tool to pull a color from the painting to blend the backdrop. There are many ways to code in this project. Use the process of tinkering, testing, debugging and persevering to produce a successful project.

"York Harbor, Coast of Maine" by Martin Johnson Heade, 1877