"A Faithful Attempt" is designed to showcase a variety of K-12 art lessons, the work of my art students, as well as other art-related topics. Projects shown are my take on other art teacher's lessons, lessons found in books or else designed by myself. Thanks for visiting!
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I acknowledge, with deep respect, that I am gathered on Treaty 7 territory. I acknowledge the many First Nations, Métis and Inuit whose footsteps have marked these lands for generations. I respect the histories, languages and cultures of all the Indigenous peoples of Canada, whose presence continues to enrich our community.
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.
Here is one of my favourite lessons: Cave Art. These were created by 6th grade students.
We looked at the famous Caves of Lascaux, in France and watched a Youtube video about them.
These paintings are estimated to be 17,300 years old. They consist mostly of primitive images of large animals, most of which are known from fossil evidence to have lived
in the area at the time. The images include bison, bulls, horses, mammoths, etc.
The caves were discovered by chance in 1941 by French teenager Marcel Ravidat, and his three friends. They found a hole in the ground while exploring a forest and Marcel climbed down into it- this tunnel led to the caves. The boys initially kept the caves a secret, but soon told their teacher about it, as they knew him to be interested in archaeology and prehistoric art. From then on, the caves became famous around the world.
The original caves are now closed to the public (due to deterioration of the paintings cause by too many visitors), but the French authorities have recreated the caves nearby which are supposedly very realistic. You can visit an excellent online version here:
(You get to take a virtual tour through the caves and listen to soothing music too! lol)
I hung up large cave art posters for the kids to refer to. They are called "Lascaux Cave Art Prints" which were ordered
from the company Crystal Productions. It also comes with a DVD. What I find so fascinating about these caves is that you can see extinct animals such as the mammoth and animals not typical for the area today (hyenas, lions, panthers, woolly rhinoceroses, in France!)
Lascaux may be one of the more famous sites for cave art in the world, but of course, there are many others including the '"Cave of Swimmers" in the Sahara Desert and the Chauvet Cave in southern France. A documentary called "Cave of Forgotten Dreams", by Werner Herzog, was recently made about these caves. There's also the Cave of Altamira in Spain.
Here's an interesting video of the rock art found in the 'Cave of Swimmers' (made famous in the movie "The English Patient".) These painted caves in Egypt were 'discovered' (the local Bedouins already knew about them) by the Hungarian
explorer László Almásy in October 1933. They are unusual in that they depict many human figures swimming, which shows that the Sahara Desert once had lakes and water.
To recreate cave walls, we used brown butcher paper and scrunched it up a bunch of times to make it nice and textural. We also added transparent washes of brown-ish tempera paint to give it even more depth. Then, using chalk pastels, we added more texture lines (cracks, irregularities on the cave walls) using dark brown and black chalk. Blend, blend, blend.
Then students made a stylized stencil of an animal(s) out of cardstock. They freehand drew these and looked at the posters for inspiration. Then stencil (use a pouncing up-and-down motion with a round brush) these onto the background paper using natural colored tempera paint. Paleolithic
artists have five main colors at their disposal: yellow, red, brown, black and
white. White is more rare, but it is seen at Lascaux cave. The colours
used were produced from ochre (reds and yellows), manganese dioxide (violet and
black) and charcoal (black). These minerals were pulverized on stone palettes
and mixed with animal fat to moisten them before they were applied with the
fingers, bone spatulae or brushes. (source)
Here's an example of an animal stencil- just use scrap card or old file folders.
(My kids use paper palettes as they don't require cleaning afterwards!)
Nice variety of colours and use of overlapping....
