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.

A color scheme doesn't guarantee a great picture though, the colors also have to be balanced on the paper.  When balancing a picture you want to think of a balance.  The brighter/darker a color, the heavier it would weigh.. if you have all the black on one side of your paper it would be so heavy it would fall down, theoretically.  If the black is spread out throughout your paper it would be balanced and not fall down.  You want to think that with each of your colors.  If your eye goes to one spot and gets stuck there, your paper is most likely not balanced.