Scanography and Digital Collage in the Classroom

Through exploration of different mediums, artists are essentially given more tools to add to their toolkit. These tools provide us with the ability to expand our practices and ideas, giving life to them in new and innovative ways. I especially enjoyed exploring scanography and digital collage in class these past few weeks and think these techniques could be readily applied to lessons in an elementary art classroom.

Scanography allows for quick, experimental image-making with a simple tool available in most schools - a scanner. I can imagine 4th and 5th graders bringing objects into the classroom and creating a series of images that display narrative and explore composition. I appreciate the ways in which scanography allows students to tweak their images easily, simply by viewing a previous scan and then adjusting the object to their liking in the next scan. 

Digital collage could fit hand-in-hand with scanography in the sense that students could incorporate images from their personal scans into their collages, reimagining the composition entirely. Additionally, digital collage allows for further exploration of composition, especially in creating imaginary scenes.