Drawing is Great for Your Brain!

Drawing and Artwork Importance

XNView Portable App from PortableApps.com - editing pictures made easy

XNView portable app is a very simple and easy-to-use graphic file editor. Although not as powerful as Photoshop or GIMP, this program does contain most of the photo editing features for beginner and intermediate users.  One of the strongest features of this portable app is the ability to batch process large numbers of pictures at the same time rather than manipulating each picture as a separate task which can be a long process.

Simply download from PortableApps.com and install the program folder to either your flash drive or to your desktop.

The main features they promote include:

• Import about 400 graphic file formats
• Export about 50 graphic file formats
• Multipage TIFF, Animated GIF, Animated ICO support
• Image IPTC, EXIF metadata support
• EXIF auto rotation support
• IPTC editing
• Resize, rotate, crop support
• Lossless rotate & crop (jpeg) support
• Adjust brightness, contrast...
• Auto levels, contrast
• Modify number of colors
• Apply filters (blur, average, emboss, ...)
• Apply effects (lens, wave, ...)
• Fullscreen mode
• Slide show with effects
• Batch convert, batch rename
• Create WEB page easily
• Screen capture
• Create contact Sheet
• Create or edit Multi-page file (TIFF, DCX, LDF)
• TWAIN & WIA support (Windows only)
• Print support (Windows only)
• Drag & Drop support (Windows only)
• Compare image side by side
• Filmstrip layout
• 44 languages support (Windows only)
• No Adware, No Spyware



Batch processing to resize multiple files



Google Art Project: A Museum of Museums

Google Art Project
This site houses virtual tours and artwork from some of the world's best museums.  Photos are of very high quality and the website allows you to zoom in to unprecedented magnification.  It comprises of approximately 17 gigapixel images and around 7000 megapixel images. This comprises of the 17 world famous museums with its inner street view. Google offers the internal galleries of the museum by the familiar street view tricycles application. An estimate of 1,061 artworks may be available on the newly launched web portal.

Virtual Tour




TED Talks:  Explanation of the Google Art Project and its development.
Amit Sood:  Building a museum of museums on the web (5 minute video)

Glogster EDU Digital Posters

http://edu.glogster.com/ 

A glog is a fun and simple online way for students to create digital posters that can contain text, photos, videos, and sound.
To ensure student privacy, Glogster EDU has provided teachers the ability to create and manage up to 50 student accounts that can be refreshed and used in following years. It's an enclosed classroom environment that can't be seen by the public which ensures student privacy over the internet.  NOTE:  Glogster EDU is no longer free.  To access the free version, users (students) will have to create their own accounts.
One of the strongest features is the teacher having the ability to view, assess, respond and check student progress in any location as long as they have internet.
The only negative I have heard from teachers is the nagging request to upgrade to the Pro version whenever a teacher logs into their classroom account. But this is only occurs once after logging in.

Sumopaint and Pixlr Online Image Editing and Painting Programs

http://www.sumopaint.com/home/
http://pixlr.com/

Both these programs are free web based applications that don't require the hassle of creating an account. Accounts can be made to house your creations and offers a few extra features but they aren't necessary to create art or modify your existing images.
The interface is quite simple where students just open up an existing file housed in their documents folder. After editing is completed the file can be saved in three basic formats:

Sumopaint saves in JPEG, PNG and the application's unique format "Sumo" which remembers all the steps of editing so a student can revert changes until the file is back to its original state.
Pixlr gives more save options in JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF and its own "PXD" that saves all the editing steps.

Pixlr

Sumopaint