Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Cave Art Comes Alive

For art class this week our assignment was to create cave art using a crumpled brown paper bag and mud paint to produce our paintings. The teachers began the lesson by explaining that many years ago people drew paintings on the walls of their caves to tell stories from their lives. This led to a discussion of how people in ancient times recorded stories by drawing and painting with natural products such as berries for coloring and mud as the medium. Our art project would be based off this ancient concept.

To begin the art project, each student was provided with a crumpled paper bag and red, green, blue, brown, black, and yellow mud paint. Then we were told think of one of our favorite childhood memories and sketch a scene of that memory on the paper bag using finger painting to create the scene. We were required to create texture in our work and apply one other natural element such as real grass, leaves, pine needles etc. to our painting.

The following photo is a scene from one of my favorite childhood memories. One of my favorite memories is gathering straw bales after wheat harvest. Even though, I was sweating and itching from the hot August sun and the straw dust, I enjoyed the work very much. The lone tree in the background is a typical scene in South Dakota farm fields.

An extension activity with this cave art lesson would be in science when students learn about different animals and their natural environments. For example, for beavers, the students would paint a lake with a beaver dam and the beavers lodge; for bears and wolves they would paint a cave; for birds and other wild animals, they would paint a woodlands etc. The paintings would correlate with nature because students use natural products to create them. When finished, the paintings would be displayed on a bulletin board.

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