Art class used to make students think of cans filled with brushes, stacks of paper, pounds of clay,  and paint all over the place. In the new Digital Arts class, none of these materials are used. In this class, painting and drawing tools are used online and  are very similar to their real world counterparts. To take Digital Arts students must first have taken 2D Art. The class had been created by the school so that it may stay modern with the technology available.

“[We have to] keep up with today’s world,” Digital Arts teacher Mary Marinel said.

Marinel has enjoyed seeing the students work hard on their projects.

“I absolutely love it,” Marinel said.

Projects are usually been assigned on a weekly basis and everything the students do will be completely manipulated on the computers.  The students have  journals where they can write and draw ideas they have for projects they are doing. The projects they journal are usually projects they complete on their own.

“[You can] draw what you want, you can have ideas you want to Photoshop and journal them,” Hussein said.

Marinel has seen a positive response in the students and is excited that the students are working hard on their projects. One project that the students have been assigned is a haunted house project. The main idea of the project is that they take a photo of a place and edit it so that it resembles a haunted house with different skies and pictures of zombies.

“It is  pretty cool. I’m doing Hagerty on Photoshop, I think it is going to come out pretty well,” freshman David Palacios said.

For junior Gassan Hussein his haunted house is placed in a forest, with weird  animals, and then he made the tones darker.

The class is also doing an Andy Warhol project, in which students will first flatten an image and then colorize it using saturation tools. By the end of the year students will be doing a project in which they will not use any images and create the image through Photoshop.

“They will come up with a rough draft and create a painting just like they would do in any Fine Arts class,” Marinel said.

Hussein  took the class due to his interest in Photoshop and to expand his knowledge of the program.

For Palacios the class is going to be extremely helpful with his future career of plans to go into  car design.

“[I want] to be pretty good at Photoshop so I can do projects on my own,” Palacios said.

“I never thought of doing computer or digital art before,” Palacios said. The class has been created to help keep up with  the expanding ways in which art can be created.