I have to admit that I picked up this Caldecott Medal-winning book for its illustrations, not necessarily for the story itself. Yet after reading this tale, I can better appreciate the author and artist’s use of bold colors and mixed media to intensify the timeless message behind the written word. In the tradition of many Asian paintings, the illustrations in this book are divided into panels and cropped in unique ways as to remove detail, adding some mystery and moving the eye across the page from broad watercolor washes to small, detailed lines in pastel.
While the Scholastic website provides a nice lesson plan for using the book in first and second grade classes, I plan on using it for my high school drawing and illustration classes as we study color, value, scale and proportion, contrast, rhythm, and blending techniques. I plan on dissecting the book and dividing the pages among illustration teams who will work collaboratively to identify strengths and weaknesses in the drawings as they relate to the mood and imagery created by the text. There are several pages where the illustrations are more abstract and may not be appealing to the target audience of 6 and 7 year olds, so I will have students create a third or fourth panel illustration for the pages they analyzed as a visual problem-solving challenge.
My plan is to use this assignment to introduce an arts-related career to my students and as a means of connecting our high school art studio to our elementary feeder schools. I believe that the story of Lon Po Po provides us with more than a way to build a bridge across cultures but also a way to reopen a bridge between different grades and schools.
Angie Stokes
9 July 2016
Review
