UE: Automatic Constellations

UE studied the works of Spanish artist Joan Miro. We learned that he was a Surrealist, which was an art and literature movement based on a person's subconscious. One of the techniques that Surrealists developed in expressing the subconscious was automatic drawing, a form of drawing where the hand is allowed to move randomly across the paper, thus revealing a part of the person's psyche. For the first portion of the lesson, I had students experiment with automatic drawing while also guiding their process. Without pencils and erasers, they drew random lines in various lengths not touching each other and lines that overlapped. They added elements of the unexpected like eyes and blobs. We looked at Miro's Constellation series as our reference and drew abstracted planets and stars, making sure to fill in the composition. To create an illusion of depth, students smudged soft pastels in the background before finally painting in their constellations.