Joan Miró was a Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramicist who lived from 1893 to 1983. He was born in Barcelona where a museum had been opened in memory of him in 1975.
Miró is one of the most important artists who made a big influence in surrealism. He started off doing landscape paintings that had unique look about them used bright colours and thick paintbrush lines. But his later work is what he is most famous for. He used bright colours and black lines to create his paintings that were images made up of shapes like circles and triangles.He had a very surrealist style and I love it and most of the people loved it. They are almost childlike designs yet it is very hard to draw and paint in this style yourself.
As part of my primary research, I went to his art gallery in Barcelona. It was a very beautiful gallery and it was my favourite one to have visited whilst I was there. It was very modern and almost represented his work. Inside there was lots of artwork of his paintings and sculptures; it was huge and there was so much to look at. There was even a room specifically set for all his sketchbook work, notes, scribbles and ideas or things that he was thinking in his mind but never made them into proper work. I loved this. 
I also saw some strange sculptures in his gallery that I thought were really cute yet humorous. These inspired me to do my own.
Looking at Miró’s strange pyramid sculptures had given me the urge to make some of my own. I thought his were quite humorous because of the innocence and daftness to even design them. I chosen to do my own because it looked fun and it’s another thing to try.
For this one is used coloured pencil and a fine liner and also a marker pen. I looked at Miró’s work and the titles and realised sometimes his work had animals or people in them that were hard to pick out until you read the title. So on this piece I thought of an animal Miró had not done in his work, which was an elephant and i wanted to do a palm tree too and make it into a Safari. So this was my starting point.
For this painting, i had used acrylic paint, watercolour and a fine liner. For this one, i had looked at Miró’s more abstract work. Ones where he used basic shapes and random lines with only 2 or 3 colours. I noticed as well that the backgrounds he used were not solid colour, some faded out and some you could see the paint brush marks. So this was my inspiration. I used a sponge in some areas for the background. I also used a bit of watercolour for the blue colour which actually didn’t work out great because acrylic is quite waterproof. It was like trying to write with a biro on a piece of solid plastic. But once it dried it was okay, you couldn’t tell I had a problem there.
I used watercolour and fine liner for this. I used the washed out look for the background in yellow which is a common thing he did in these sorts of paintings. These were his more recent artworks and is my favourite style of his work. So I laid out a few in front of me and mixed different shapes and objects together to create my own. This took the longest to do but I really enjoyed it. I’d like to do more artwork in like this.
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