Open Resource Centre

This site seems very good for those of you who would like to allow your children to make their own avatars.

Myavatareditor is really simple and intuitive to use, probably needing no instruction at all

Again from Wes Fryer’s podcast, Yotophoto - royalty free, Creative commons protected images – ideal for  anyone using web images -  a simple one stop search for usable images

Who’s using Yotophoto?

Designers, Bloggers, Educators, and Digital Artists from all over the world are adding imagery to their projects for free.

About the images

We index images in the public domain or available for free usage under various forms of copyleft licensing.

I would highly recommend ArtPad for early years and primary, rather than Microsoft paint for artwork.  There are photorealistic brushes of different sizes and most importantly, an opacity control, overlaying paint just like real water colours.

Great fun for all – including the children

This is a free online painting resource that is really easy to use and while the tools are fairly basic, Artpad has 2 really interesting features:

If you want to print bigger sizes than A4 and you don’t have an A3 printer, don’t despair.  If you have seen my previous post  Picasa – Find and enjoy the pictures on your computer in seconds, firstly follow this and download and install Picasa.

This is a wonderful tool for viewing, organising, finding and altering your digital photos.

The first time you use it, it will look in your main folders “my documents” and “My pictures” and will add all your photos into Picasa viewer.

To make enlargements, simply click once on a photo, then go to the “create” menu, select make a poster and choose the % increase you want – up to 1000% – this uses 100 A4 sheets!

This process then adds all your new pages into the same folder.  Just click once on the first photo, hold down “shift” key (the one on the lhs with arrow pointing up) the click on the last photo.  Simply click on the print button.  You can choose to have borderless or overlap – decide whether you are going to use a backing or not

Ensure you use a good camera 4 Mp’s min for the smaller sizes – up to 10-20 sheets should be ok (you could print just one page to check qualty before committing to 100!)

I would suggest you check available ink if doing more than 200% as the number of sheets escalates very quickly.

Ideally, this process should be used with a colour laser printer (Colour laser printer in schools, a view) for speed, quality and economy.

Combine this process with the mosaic software on this site and you could produce a mosaic of any picture using all the children’s faces - Photo mosaic pictures – free software

You could also produce a large photo with all the children in the school as a display – the ideas keep rollin’ in

Let me know if you have any ideas yourself – please feedback

Mr. Picassohead
Great fun creating Picasso-esque images

Design site Nifty Tutorials has posted a practical step by step on how to create a mosaic effect for your photographs using Photoshop.

From start to finish, this shouldn’t take you more than (tops) 10 minutes, and it really makes a cool looking transformation

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Personally, I think this would be a great way to combine a few of your favorite vacation photos into one awesome montage; you could really use this with any combination of photos.

many thanks to Lifehacker

You have always wanted to see your name of the front cover – well now’s your chance

You can create them yourself at MagMyPic, which has realistic fake magazine covers ready for you to add your own uploaded image.

Thanks to