Art-centered QAVTC class blends graphic design, English skills | Quincy Public Schools

“It’s basically just encouraging being brave and exploring the unknown,” said Sass, a Quincy High School senior and one of several guest readers this week in the Quincy Area Vocational Technical Center preschool.

Sass wrote and illustrated the book as a project for a dual graphic arts/English class offering QAVTC students opportunities to hone skills in both subjects.

“It just kind of interested me. I’d already gone through the more traditional art classes where it’s on paper, so I wanted to try doing it on a computer,” Sass said.

“Drawing the characters was basically the first thing I did, then I had to think of the story,” he said. “It doesn’t have to have an amazing ‘Lord of the Rings’ kind of story. It’s just a fun thing to work through.”

QHS senior Faith Van Hecke said both the project, and the class, are pretty cool.

“Combining two things I really like — designing and storytelling — in a project is really neat,” said the author of “The Little Astronaut.” “I want my future career to be something related to graphic design.”

QAVTC students earn two credits, one elective and one English, in the two-hour block class taught by Kate Brown and Austin Riese.

“There’s so much English that actually goes into graphics, but I’ve been struggling to try and find ways to add things into my assignments for that part because it’s not my thing,” Brown said. “It’s not taking away my graphic assignments. It’s how can we add English concepts to those assignments.”

Students learn to work in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop along with principles of design, then incorporate the reading and writing of an English class in a variety of projects.

“If someone were to ask how does it work, the simplest answer is to say it just kind of does,” Riese said. “Ultimately it’s art-centered. The majority of everything we do has art first, then the English component comes in after that.”

In one assignment, students wrote about someone who inspires them then used information from the essay to “create” a portrait of the person with different typefaces and fonts.

‘It was really fun,” Brown said.

The final project for the semester will have students developing a board game, creating everything from the box it comes in to the concept, the instructions and the game board.

“The trickiest part so far is trying to blend in literature,” Riese said. “It’s really difficult to spend a lot of time reading when there’s a lot of time students need to devote to learning new techniques and art strategies.”

His favorite project, so far, has been the children’s book, which blended the artistic and writing abilities of the QHS students who donated the finished products to the preschool.

“Some may say there’s not much difficulty in writing a children’s book, but in reality it’s quite challenging. Every word, everything you choose to include in the story has to be relevant and applicable to a 3- to 5-year-old,” Riese said. “It’s been really fascinating to see how they come up with everything.”

QHS junior Yazuri Morage-Morales based the characters of her book, “New Girl,” on two little girls from last year’s preschool class and loved reading it aloud to this year’s students.

“The book writing was a little easier than the actual design. I’m not really good with technology,” she said.

QHS administrators tried offering the class a few years ago, “but didn’t think they had the right match for teachers. They wanted to try it again with some different ones,” Brown said. “So far, it’s been going really great.”

Simply offering the class provides another lesson for students.

“The class itself kind of demonstrates how you can make something new out of small changes. We’re able to add an English credit to an art class just by manipulating a few things,” Riese said. “Perhaps students can take that away, too, that sometimes there’s more than they can see with just their eyes. They have to use imagination, use intuition.”