Imaginations Soar With Dynamic Doodles

Create colorful fantasy blobs and shapes. Decorate them with interesting lines and dots! Find words to describe your free-form symbols with a technique called automatic writing.

• 1.

  Joan Miro (1893-1983) was a Spanish artist who was involved with an art movement called Surrealism. Surrealism began in the early 1900s and is based on things that people think, write, and draw from deep inside our brains, called the subconscious. Sigmund Freud studied the strange ideas from our dreams. A group of artists, called Surrealists, used these ideas to create their art. Many of Miro’s paintings show people as strange and simple blobs.

• 2.

  Try some of these techniques to make your own Surrealist art with the brilliant Crayola Neon Color Explosion® Marker and Paper System. Let your imagination soar!

• 3.

  Start with the background, perhaps a simple landscape with a few lines to show the horizon and maybe a layer of water. Or it can simply be a shape following an interesting line. Color small areas with short lines going the same way. Make blobs going in different directions. Overlap the edges a little. This creates an interesting texture that looks much like an oil painting.

• 4.

  On small pieces of Neon Color Explosion Paper, draw a curvy shape with contrasting colors to represent a person. Draw other silly shapes to be other things around the people, but keep them abstract (they don’t look real). Attach these pieces with glue dots to give your work extra dimension.

• 5.

  Add interesting dark or contrasting lines, dots, and squiggles to finish your bright, Surreal picture.

• 6.

  What do your shapes remind you of? With a Crayola Colored Pencil, write down the first things that come to mind. This is called free association.

• 7.

  Use this list of words to write a story or poem about your picture. With this technique, called automatic writing, your thoughts can be random and the ideas may not make sense! These are the real ideas on which Surrealism is based.

Benefits

• Students research the basic ideas and techniques of the art movement called Surrealism.
• Students create abstract images that slightly represent real objects.
• Students practice free association and automatic writing techniques in relation to their artwork.

Adaptations

• Students exchange their artwork so that friends can free associate their own lists of words.
• This could be a great project with which to introduce free verse poetry.
• A more elaborate story could be produced, individually or in groups, based on the artworks created.
• Teachers may wish to preview Joan Miro’s work to select the most appropriate treatment of subjects for students.
• Assessment: Students will be successful if they have created a drawing using the techniques described with free-form shapes, and have attempted to describe it loosely with the instructed writing techniques.