One of the most versatile and flexible projects I have ever done, you can switch it up, create a theme, do it across all year levels and experiment with any or every media you like ... oh these booklets! aka fold our journals we originally purchased from Zart Art.

I set this project as a holiday homework assignment over summer. I was blown away on returning from break to find a gorgeous piles of artwork booklets so carefully curated by each student! It was such a great surprise because my class only really had one very very quick lesson introduction to elements and principles and were left to experiment and refer to my handouts during their time off. But as you can see their booklets are pretty impressive!

What are Elements and Principles?

Elements and Principles - they're kinda important! I like to talk about elements as being the building blocks of all designs. Like a child building a lego toy, they select different shapes and colours of building blocks. Principles are they way elements are arranged. A child building a lego house will arrange their blocks differently to when they would build a boat.

A focus throughout all my art and design lessons is finding opportunities to weave in subject vocabulary. Students must know, identify, describe and use elements and principles in their own creations. We also work up towards identifying, describing, analysing how other designers have used elements and principles in their work and what effect it has.

The Project

This introductory project was centred around students manipulating a simple silhouette (provided by me) and creating drawing that emphasised each element and principle. The silhouette was key! They had a choice between a beetle, butterfly, running man or bee. I highly recommend providing this boundary. It would be quite an extensive project to come up with 16 totally different designs - by using a silhouette motif the design is essentially already decided and the project became more about how to manipulate it to show element and principle understanding.

The students were each given a fold out journal to take home over the summer holidays to complete. This was also a win! These little fold out journals are beautiful and immediately there was excitement over how to fill each blank page. I gave them free choice to experiment with different media, they could use collage, pen, pencil, paint, digital editing, photography ... but I must see at least 3-4 different examples.

Below are some of the resources I created for this task and our student outcomes.

Presentation Examples

Student Work