Photoshop Curiosity Cabinets

Submitted by: Kris Fontes, Union City High School, Union City PA
UNIT: Photoshop - Layers - Collections
Lesson: Curiosity Cabinets
Grade Level: Middle school and up

Summary:

Students will be creating collages one of two ways- with printed images or in software. After reviewing the links below and studying resources on curiosity cabinets, students start out with an image of an empty cabinet and then apply their images on the empty shelves.

Kris's students used eBay as a source for images. Many schools can not access eBay from school, so I have altered this lesson to use selected items from a Museum. Fair use allows such a use - as the images you show will not be high resolution and will only be thumbnail versions of the original image (and this use also falls under research - educational use). Kris used a corner cupboard with her students. I wanted to play with this Louis the 15th Provençal Hanging Curio (thanks to French Accents, that allowed me to use the image above for educational purposes).

Image as taken from the internet Selected items from the Metropolitan Museum of Art	Image after adding "curiosity" items

Students can decide which cabinet to use (the Louis the 15th cabinet has glass sides - perhaps the left glass can be placed on top of images as a transparent layer). Have students go to selected Museum site(s). They will choose up to 6 images (7 at the most - depending on size) and will save information about each object into a file.

Open the image of the cabinet. Then open each object image and cut out background (either manually or with software such as Adobe Photoshop) Copy and paste images on shelves, adjusting size. Ideally, they can add shadows. Once finished, students will write a short paper about their "collection" (include the information about each image).

Kris Fontes detailed lesson appeared in School Arts Magazine.

Note: I wrote to Metropolitan Museum of Art for permission to use their images for this educational lesson and did not get a reply.

Resources

Books

Cabinets of Curiosities: Four Artists, Four Visions - Four Wisconsin artists are passionate collectors who use objects from their own collections to inform their individual artwork. This catalog documents an installation by each of the four artists that is reminiscent of the 16th- and 17th- century Wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders, private collections of natural and man-made objects.

Cabinets of Curiosities - In an effort to inspire unusual collaborations between the wood turning and furniture fields, Cabinets of Curiosities, co-organized by the Wood Turning Center and the Furniture Society, features 14 cabinets of extraordinary diversity and intrigue created by 50 interdisciplinary artists.

Resources for Cabinets of Curiosity
http://pages.infinit.net/cabinet/introduction.html (Page in French. Translate it here)
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kuns/hd_kuns.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_curiosities
http://www.mmoca.org/starrytransit/cabinets_of_curiosities.php (Archive)

Alternate Idea:

Students who want a larger collection of objects might want to create a virtual "Whatnot" shelf. Whatnot shelving units were common in Victorian times. It is easy to find suitable images on line.