How to make Julian Opie Style Portraits in Paint.net

Context:

In Year 4 the children are expected to undertake a repeating Patterns topic in ICT. This is an old topic that I usually keep for Year 3 and transferable skills; copy, paste, managing multiple programs etc.

But it needed a revamp long ago. So I tried to do this when I saw a blog post about 4 years ago in MSPaint. The blog demoed it in Illustrator and most students don't understand Illustrator nevermind own it! MSPaint was a disaster regardless which year group tried it because of the lack of layers.

We turned to Paint.net and Dazzle. I'm not a fan of Dazzle as the way that layers are managed I feel is not as smooth as they are in Paint.Net. And, it's not Open Source - the number one priority.Opie Portrait complete

The series of videos is also used for lessons so there are a few references to the children that might not apply to other people watching. 

There are a few extensions at the end that I like to give the more able children who are natural explorers of software - a kind of "How can you make this?" "Can we use this in another program?"

What you need:

1. Download and install Pain.net from here: www.GetPaint.Net 

This is for windows only sorry to those Mac Users but I am hoping to make the instructions for Splashup so that you don't need to install anything and it's OS independent.

2. take a photo of yourself or friend without smiling and showing teeth. An open mouth does not work so well.

3. Open the photo inside Paint.net.

4. Follow these tutorials.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Extension

How else can we improve our skills? What other programs could we use this in? 

Use the Image Rotate tool in the image menu.

Add to Sketchup textures

Make a new texture in Sketchup and paste it all over the building.

Download a building and make an art gallery.

 make a repeating pattern and colour th backgrounds in patterns.