Joan Miro "Nocturne"

                    I wanted my seventh graders to do a lesson on artist, Joan Miro.  I wanted our focus to be BALANCE.  The problem was, I wasn't actually sure how to start off this lesson and inspire the students aside from showing them lots of examples of Miro's work. As I was struggling over this I began to think how Miro's paintings have always intrigued me because it seems as though he just made a bunch of scribbles and then made those scribbles into recognizable images- almost like laying out at the beach and turning the clouds into a dinosaur or tractor.

And then it came to me!  THe students would start out with a random line that filled up their entire paper and swirled and crossed over itself again and again- almost like a scribble line and then they would look at their paper and see what parts of their scribbles looked like and add to it.

While the students drew their lines, I called back two at a time to splatter their entire paper with paint using a toothbrush.  The students enjoyed this and it gave their backgrounds a more interesting texture.

Once the students had the lines drawn, I encouraged them to keep turning their paper so that they saw it from different angles.

The pencil lines were outlined in permanent marker.

For the painting.. I took the opportunity to introduce the students to color schemes and the principal Balance.  The students were using a color scheme similar to Miro's (red, blue, yellow & green)  A color scheme is a limited set of colors.  This is a good trick to make a painting cohesive and really have unity.