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Artists of Any Age Can Make This Cool Art!
About the Artist: Joan Miro
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish artist from Barcelona who lived from 1893 to 1983. He loved to paint, sculpt, and use ceramics to make his art. Joan Miro is best known for his surrealist art, which means that the art he made looked almost like if you were to paint a dream.
Sometimes when you have a dream, you remember some shapes, but not everything in perfect detail. That's sort of what this painting looks like. Many surrealist artists used their art to convey ideas and images to depict dream worlds. Joan Miro's art looks a little like a celestial scene, or a nighttime sky. In this watercolor, we're going to use his surrealist style to draw our own space-like dream world!
What You'll Need
- Watercolor paints
- Watercolor brushes
- Water Jar
- Watercolor paper
- Masking tape
- Sharpie
- Colored markers/colored Sharpies/colored pencils
First, let's use masking tape around the edges of our paper so that way, at the end of our project, we can take the tape off and our art will have a border, like a frame. Beautiful!
Step 1: Color Your Background
First, let's color the ENTIRE white area of the paper with color. Use a lot of water and a lot of colors to blend your entire background together. Blend colors together to paint the sky. You can add water all over so that way it blends together. Then, we'll wait a few minutes to dry. If it's taking too long to wait for it to dry, then go ahead and use a blow dryer to help it dry faster.
PRO TIP: With watercolor, wetter is always better!
Step 2: Draw Your Celestial Scene
Now that your background is dry, grab your Sharpie and let's play a fun game! Google some Joan Miro paintings and find a shape that he used in his paintings. You can draw:
- A moon
- Circles
- Stars
- Concentric circles (like a target)
- Circles that link together, like a constellation
- A Bowtie shape
- Tic Tac Toe shape (or a hashtag shape! #)
and more shapes you might find! You want to fill your ENTIRE painting with shapes that you like that he used, and make it your own. Make sure some of the shapes are half filled in or all the way filled in with black ink. Don't forget to add details, have shapes overlap each other, add small circles inside of any blank space.
Step 3: Add Some Color
For this step, you can use whatever you have at home: colored markers, colored Sharpies, or colored pencils. We're going to go inside shapes that we really like and add some color into our celestial scene. Don't be afraid to use LOTS of different colors for this step. The more color, the more your scene will pop! You'll want to make sure whatever color you use is saturated, which means you can't see the background through it.
Once you're finished coloring, peel the tape off and... voila!
The Final Product!
