Sunday, September 13, 2015

Cave Art Paintings


This is a Lascaux Caves inspired art project I do with my Grade 4's during our "Prehistoric Art" unit. 
I start off by showing a Youtube video explaining all about the famous Lascaux caves in France. Then we look at some up close photos of the actual cave paintings. We discuss what types of materials early man might have used to create the paintings (animal fat mixed with pigment,s blood, ash/charcoal. etc). We also talk about why they would have created these paintings and the types of animals that are represented.

For the art project, I pre-cut large squares of simple brown paper from a big roll I have. Students can choose to tear/rip the edges to make it uneven and rough. using tempera pucks, students mix a variety of earth tones and paint over the entire paper to give it a cave wall type effect. 


I give the students a handout of various cave art images for them to create their animal stencil.


On piece of cardstock/tagboard, students draw a simple outline of an animal.


Then they poke a hole in the middle and cut out the interior to create a stencil.


They place the stencil onto their painted background paper and, using charcoal or chalk pastels, rub around the outside of the stencil then use their finger to blend the chalk to the inside. It creates a really cool soft faded effect that also mimics shading a bit.
They can overlap and change colours however they wish.



Grade 4 results:



























4 comments:

  1. Hello,

    Where did you get the handout with the animals. Would you be willing to share?

    Thanks for your great post. It looks like fun!

    Mary Lee

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is brilliant ! Thank you su much for sharing !

    ReplyDelete
  3. What a great idea!!! Where did you get those pictures of various animals? Would you be willing to share....?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks everyone for your comments. I made the handout myself. Just Google image "cave art animals" and choose what you like! Copy and paste into a Word document and voila!

    ReplyDelete