by Andrea Mulder-Slater
Mood boards are collages created with pictures of building styles, colors, patterns and products. They are a fun way for architects or designers to share ideas when they are thinking about how to design or decorate a new space or place. Step into the mind of an architect as you make a mood board (or two!).
What You Need:
- Construction paper (12” x 18”, or 2 sheets of 9” x 12” taped together)
- Magazines or pictures printed from the Internet
- Scissors
- Glue
- Optional: Tape, paint chips, fabric swatches
What You Do:
Collect magazines and newspapers that are no longer being read. (Check with an adult to make sure.) Look for home or lifestyle magazines that have lots of photos of houses and gardens. If you don’t have magazines, search online with an adult and ask them for help printing some pictures.
Flip through the pages of the magazines and look for photos of interiors (insides) and exteriors (outsides) of houses and other buildings that catch your eye. Do you like big staircases and gardens full of flowers? How about large windows and skylights? Cut out the pictures that you like and put them in a pile to be sorted.
Look through all of your pictures and see if you can see similarities between any of them. Maybe lots of the pictures show houses that look the same or colors that keep appearing. Take your time to choose your absolute favorites from the pile.
To make your mood board, you will need a large piece of construction paper (12” x 18”) for a base. If all you have are smaller sheets or paper, that’s ok! Just tape two pieces together.
Lay out the pictures you picked out on the background paper and when you are happy with how they all look together, you can glue them in place. You can leave some of the background paper showing, or you can cover the base completely.
You made a mood board showing your favorite building styles. It can be hard for some people to imagine how something will look, before it has been made. Mood boards can help architects share ideas with clients, but they can also work the other way around too. Clients can make mood boards to let architects know their likes and dislikes.
Pretend you are an architect and present your mood board to a friend. Talk about the choices you made, and why you made them.
