Busy Week, End of a Brief Career, Some Great News

I’m winding down my high school teaching career this week. My final day of teaching high school classes, perhaps for good, is this Friday. I taught high school full time for the past three years. If you want to know why I am deciding to leave this glamorous and rewarding career, check out my recent posts below.

The good, great, fantastic news is that I get to go back to teaching college kids (and adults) in July. I got a part-time teaching position at the Art Institute, where I will have two web design classes. Each class is four hours long, once per week, for an eleven-week quarter. I could perhaps have taught there full-time, but I want to keep my schedule open for all the freelance design work I hope to pull in.

My other good news is that I have decided to create a new side business for myself (in addition to Blue Lobster Art and Design). Some of my tutorials at BluLob have been very popular. However, I’ve been kind of all-over-the-map with what I create. For the past year or so I’ve been thinking about writing a Photoshop tutorial book geared toward the classroom. So, instead of cranking out a new tutorial a couple of times a week in random order, I’m getting organized. I want to create a comprehensive curriculum and have it all online. This new effort will appear in due time at 60Lessons.com.

Here’s the synopsis:

Art and design lessons tailored for the classroom:

  • 45-minute daily lessons
  • 10 lessons per unit
  • 60 lessons per course
  • Instructor guides
  • Unit reviews
  • Unit projects with rubrics
  • Unit quizzes

Subjects:

  • Photoshop
  • Illustrator
  • Dreamweaver
  • HTML and XHTML
  • CSS
  • design principles
  • drawing
  • and more!

My slogan is Daily Doses of Smart™.

I hope to build the site to

  • offer 60 lessons for beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels
  • invite guest teachers
  • cater to people learning on their own as well, perhaps providing paid coaching
  • eventually provide a social networking/community setting

Some of the 60Lessons.com materials will be free, and others will be available at affordable prices. Banner ads alone do not pay the bills, I have found.

I’ve put together a rough outline for the three levels of Photoshop courses. I’d love to have your feedback on this venture. Is the 60Lessons.com concept of interest to you? What would you want to see offered?


Free graffiti fonts to download

Here are five graffiti fonts from dafont.com you can download and install for free.

Graffiti

Keny Graffiti

Zit Graffiti

Graffiti Treat

Amsterdam Graffiti

There are 62 “graffiti” fonts at fontspace.com, but these are the most appealing to my eyes:

Whoa!

Cancontrol

RoteFlora

KrylonGothic

Bboy

A few more I found at graffitifonts.net:

Graffpitty

Homeboy

Degrassi

To install fonts on Windows:
1. Unzip the .zip font file you downloaded (right-click, choose “Extract All” and a location)
2. Drag the unzipped font file into the Fonts folder (you will find the Fonts folder in your C: drive, inside the Windows folder); font files can end in .ttf, .otf, .fon, .ttc, or .pfb, among others.


Fantastic resource for beginning graffiti artists

Coloring-pages-book-for-kids-boys.com has a wealth of wonderful “coloring pages”, including graffiti-style bubble-letters (click on the images to go to the related pages):

I have an idea to print these out and encourage students not only to imitate the styles, but color them in with special colorful touches, like highlights and shading. After becoming familiar with these styles, students would be urged to start developing their own styles.