Learning about Design Principles

Aug 12

Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang and A Book About Design by Mark Gonyea are essential reading to any budding artist, art enthusiast or art teacher. I can’t praise these two books enough for making color, shape, page placement engaging and interesting. I recently used these two books in my art class.

First I read A Book About Design because it gives an excellent introduction to design principles like color, shape, and the 1-3-9 ratio. The book is fun to read! Students can also participate by share reading to the class, which would make it even more engaging for them. Afterwards we did an activity incorporating design elements discussed in the book. I required the children to include three different design elements they learned from the book to make it more challenging. The children easily mastered these design ideas and created colorful, balanced designs using shapes and lines.

Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang uses the classic folk tale Little Red Riding Hood to discuss how line, shape, color and page placement can help tell a story. The children used black and white paper to tell their stories. One child used pink dots to represent the Three Little Pigs, and a orange tongue to represent the hungry wolf in her illustration. A red triangle in another story represents Little Red Riding Hood, and the lines represent trees. One tree is on the diagonal to create tension.

Paper placed off the page tells the
viewer that the story continues.