Personalized Education:
Creating New Classes
By Stephen Krohn, Art Teacher
When you visit the lobby of the Donald R. Nickerson Performing Arts Center on campus right now, you have the pleasure of viewing the inaugural display of art from the first Digital Painting and Illustration course at The Gregory School. In this class, students learn a variety of methods for creating their work, either using Photoshop with drawing tablets and styluses or using Procreate on iPads.
The technology, the flexibility, and the focus on personalizing education here at The Gregory School have given us this opportunity...
Unlike traditional painting mediums, working digitally gives students freedom to try new techniques without the fear of losing work or making mistakes. In this world, images and objects can be edited and manipulated quickly. If there is something you don’t like, you can just turn that layer off rather than trashing the whole project and starting over.
The Gregory School has been offering courses in Digital Design over the past few years, in which students explore a variety of ways to create art on the computer. In these classes, students have created images with Photoshop, logos and fonts with Illustrator, and now we even have Adobe Animate to create animation.
Digital painting has been a part of this curriculum as well, but many students wanted to pursue this topic even further. The technology, the flexibility, and the focus on personalizing education here at The Gregory School have given us this opportunity to take our art in even more directions by creating a class that focuses exclusively on digital painting and illustration.
"It is the spirit of collaboration that impresses me the most at the Gregory School. There is so much creativity coming from the students and my fellow staff. It is their imagination that is continuously driving my own creativity as an art teacher. When we all begin collaborating together and sharing our amazing ideas, only magical things can happen. It’s exciting to be part of the faculty at The Gregory School and have this positive energy in my life every day."
Graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BFA from the University of Arizona, Stephen Krohn is one of our Middle School Faculty. Besides teaching at the Gregory school, Mr. Krohn has spent much of his career teaching in Bangladesh, South Korea, Alaska, and various camps across the US.