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Magical Miro Collage

Students critique the imaginative, surreal images of artist Joan Miro and create a mixed media collage that combines colorful shapes with life-like details of living animals and objects.

Lesson Plan

Supplies Needed

Gather all the supplies needed to bring your craft ideas to life! From paints and markers to glue and scissors, our crafts section has everything to spark creativity and make every project truly special.

Steps

  • Step 1

    Show students images of paintings by Joan Miró such as "The Singing Fish," "The Escape Ladder," or "The Red Sun," all of which incorporate bold colors and shapes with connecting or expressive lines. Ask students to point out some of the shapes they see. Note that some are geometric (well-defined mathematically precise shapes such as squares, triangles, circles) and others are organic (irregular, undefined, unstructured). 

  • Step 2

    Ask students to draw several shapes, both geometric and organic, on construction paper and then cut them out. Then ask them to arrange and glue these shapes on another piece of paper. Now they can use crayons to add lines, faces, and embellishments that transform the glued shapes into something else, perhaps an animal or inanimate object.

  • Step 3

    Have students present their Miró-inspired art to the class and describe the shapes they used, whether they're geometric or organic, and what they represent, including the feelings depicted by the art.

Standards

ARTS: Speculate about processes an artist uses to create a work of art. 

MATH: Describe, compare, quantify, and classify objects by attributes. Sort objects into categories. 

Adaptations

Joan Miró also created sculptures that incorporated interesting shapes. Have students look at some of these such as "The Caress of a Bird" or "Dona i Ocell." Then ask them to create a shape sculpture out of Model Magic.

Surrealism seeks to channel the unconscious as a way to unlock the power of imagination. Ask students to look at some examples such as "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali or "The Son of Man" by René Magritte. Then ask them to create a surrealistic drawing of their own.