The Ten Plagues: Digital Art Edition (Rashi School Online Lesson)

Hello Middle Schoolers! This is a lesson for my middle school students at The Rashi School.

This is a fun, challenging digital art project for you to create for Passover. You'll be using an online drawing program, Myoats, to create abstract art with radial symmetry.

Here's what to do:

1. Read through this entire post. 
2. Watch the Myoats video tutorial. Click here to see the MyOats video tutorial
3. Go to the Myoats webpage
4. Create an abstract design for each of the ten plagues. Choose colors, shapes, and lines that you think express what happened and/or how it makes you feel. (The ten plagues are listed further down in this post)
5. Plan to spend about five minutes on each design, or more if you need it. 
6. Download each design after you finish it, create a document with all of your designs and label which is which, in order.

Here are some examples I created.

"The Nile is Blood"

"Darkness in Egypt"

Skills reviewed in the tutorial:

• Mirror 
• Changing brush colors
• Choosing number of axes
• Darkening/lightening colors
• Changing brushes
• Varying brush size
• Varying opacity
• Creating dots
• Undoing work
• Downloading finished work
• There is a guide to all of the functions on Myoats here

Vocabulary you will learn:

• Opacity
• Radial Symmetry

Here's a list of the ten plagues. For detailed descriptions of each one click here:

1. Blood
2. Frogs
3. Lice
4. Wild Beasts
5. Cattle Disease
6. Boils
7. Hail
8. Locusts
9. Darkness
10. Death of the Firstborn

Here are some ideas of what do do with your plague art:

1. Print it out and assign family members to each hold a few up during the reading of the ten plagues
2. Put the printouts in a sheet protector and use them as placemats at the seder
3. Use them as a decoration on the wall near your seder table.