Two-Dimensional Design  
Assignment    
Color Shape and Value   
  “What should Jesus look like in our 20th Century conception?”
     
Description:  
  The whole class will collaborate on a large portrait painting that will integrate the use of basic elements of design (form) with an idea or question (content): How should Jesus be imaged or represented in our own day? Each student will be responsible for completing a section of the painting.
       
Content:  
  We will start with a discussion of Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ, and with reading from David Morgan’s Icons of American Protestantism, and Ted Prescott’s “We See Jesus”, from Image: journal of the arts and religion.
       
  We will expand on the idea that we see Christ in people or in each other. We can take photographs of each person in the class, posed like Sallman’s Head of Christ, and composite them into a grid of images on top of the well known portrait. The resulting image imitates a cubist style accumulation of features derived from the twenty-one students in the class.
       
Form:  
  With the features arranged in a grid of 49 rectangles, each student will complete two roughly one foot rectangular panels The photograph that results from the compositing will also be divided into 49 three in rectangles. Each student will enlarge their 3 inch rectangular portion to fit into the 9" x 12" panel.
   
Solid Color Shapes:
  The colors in the photograph are to be simplified into solid color shapes. Eliminate blending or gradation which creates a myriad of colors. Simplify the gradation down to three or four solid color shapes that simulate the gradation, especially when viewed from a distance.
   
Color into Value
  Every color fits into a value scale from black to white—purple being the darkest a closest to black and yellow being the closest to white. Translate the colors in your segment of the photograph into values from black to white including greys.The resulting panes will approximate a black and white photograph of the original image
   
  Each student makes her/his own black by mixing primary or secondary colors