Teaching Patterns and Design In The Classroom

One starting point for teaching the ideas behind creating patterns and visual design is to have four cups each filled with many units of the same object. (For younger students possibly one cup of elbow macaroni, one cup of kidney beans etc., for older ones, possibly boxes instead of cups filled with items of unusual visual interest which have no logical relation to each other such as...who knows.... large nails, hair rollers, empty pop cans, paper clips etc., ) Place four students at a table giving each a cup. First time around, have the first student put one or more pieces on the table, followed by the next student etc until there is a line consisting of a combination of the four items. Then, underneath, REPEAT the same arrangement thereby MAKING a pattern.
For younger children, have them draw contour shapes of the pattern on paper, IE., three kidney beans one macaroni etc., repeating at least three lines of it. At this point everyone should have three lines of the same contour shapes. Introduce the concept of weight and emphasis and some of the ways to visually achieve it by using color, texture, values, scale etc., Have each student choose where he or she wants the visual emphasis to be in the drawing and how to achieve it. Some solutions are based upon color theory- A high contrast design would use complimentary colors, a harmonious one would use colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel, a monochromatic one would use values of the same color. (Two blue beans, an orange macaroni, a blue bean, or a checkerboard of light blue, dark blue, then dark blue light blue ignoring the shapes and only using color, or two plain tonal objects, one with crosshatching, another tonal one etc., ) Try to get as many visual solutions to the design problem as there are students. When the drawings are finished the concept of visual design can be reinforced by asking the students to experience the drawings using another one of their other senses. For example, they could "read the designs and clap them". This would connect visual rhythms to auditory ones. (Three blue could be soft claps and an orange could be loud etc., ) They could "jump and walk the designs" kinesthetically experiencing the visual patterns and designs etc., For older students, the emphasis could be created as a means to convey something artistic through the visual design. They could be asked to communicate "states of being", or virtually anything else through the visual design. They could take the patterns and visually manipulate them any way they wanted (scale, positive/negative space etc., ) in order to express something artistic. For example, "make an agitated pattern, make a lethargic pattern, make an excited pattern, make an exhausted pattern... make a pattern that just learned that its missing brother had been found-IE, how does one visually express joy and elation using a repeating pattern?) Stretch their minds conceptually and they will be forced to use the elements of art to express the invisible. A critique could begin with the discussion of how and what was done in the work to express the intangible. "What was done to this pattern to visually express speed? etc., "