As well as looking at art from our modern age, I also try to introduce children to folk art and tribal art from around the world, as well as the imagery created by ancient civilisations and prehist…

játékos alkotófeladat a fun art game

Students love creating cave art paintings! Lots of art materials are used for this layered project. I like to have my students create these projects at the beginning of the year to build their conf…

Boy, oh, boy, did the 2nd graders have fun with this lesson. You know you have a keeper when someone tells you that they wish they could do this lesson for the rest of the year... We spent a whole period viewing images from and talking about the earliest artists, our pre-historic ancestors. We talked about sculptures, megaliths and finally cave paintings, focusing on the Lascaux Cave in France amoung others. 2nd graders learned that pre-historic people existed before the invention of a written language and created some amazing and beautiful artwork. I handed out a reference sheet with some simple line drawings influenced by images found in different cave art. Students were also given large sheets of brown craft paper. I encouraged them to crumple their paper so they could draw on a rough surface. Using chalk pastel, students drew a large animal. I explained that pastels blend nicely and had them use at least three colors in their animal. They also drew symbols that were found in different caves. The last and most exciting part for the students was when I sprayed their hands with red paint to simulate the cave of the hands in Santa Cruz, Argentina. This was a super fun lesson for everyone that uses many skills, teaches history and opens the door for interesting, educational conversation.

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: http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/?lng=en#/fr/00.xml (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.... Great sense of motion in this one!

Explore painted paper art's 783 photos on Flickr!

As well as looking at art from our modern age, I also try to introduce children to folk art and tribal art from around the world, as well as the imagery created by ancient civilisations and prehist…

I have been fascinated by the caves at Lascaux, France, since I learned about them in one of my very first college art history classes. I wanted to see if my sons would find them equally fascinating. They did. Before we made our own "cave paintings," we read a great book that familiarized my sons with the discovery of the caves. The story is so appealing to kids because it was, in fact, some young boys that stumbled on these historic caves and discovered their paintings and engravings, which were made by some of the earliest humans. Art has a long rich history. Cave paintings show us its very origin. Our Artist Recreation Of course, we don't have a cave wall to use as our medium, so I grabbed a roll of brown packaging paper (like what you'd wrap a package in to mail) that was collecting dust in our basement. I cut a large piece. I crinkled it to give it more of a stone effect and swiped on a few areas of brown and white acrylic paint in an attempt to replicate the look of cave walls. Then my sons used taupe, brown, black, and white oil pastels and some stencils I'd made. To make your own stencils, print my free template onto office paper, overlay sheets of transparency paper (think thick clear report covers), and using an exacto craft knife, carefully cut away the animals shapes. The boys were able to position the stencils anywhere they chose and even flip them to make the mirror image for variety. Holding the stencil steady (and tightly), they ran the oil pastel along the inner edge of the stencil to make an outline of a bull, deer and her fawn, bird, and human hunter (complete with bow and arrow). This required patience and determination for our 5-year-old, but since the real paintings didn't have crisp lines, even his wavering hand seemed to add to the authenticity. When we were done, he told me all about what our "cave painting" was illustrating! More Books In the evening, the boys read two other great books to extend the learning even further. My husband read The First Drawing to our 5-year-old. It is a wildly imaginative tale of a child who invented art by drawing in caves. It starts "Imagine ... you were born before the invention of drawing, more than thirty thousand years ago." This makes the cave painters very relatable to kids! My 9-year-old read Discovery in the Cave on his own. While the reading level was much lower than he's used to, he was fascinated by the small maps that detailed all of the different areas in the caves of Lascaux. It contained enough unique information from the book we read before our art activity to keep him interested.

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: http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/?lng=en#/fr/00.xml (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.... Great sense of motion in this one!

Sixth graders have finished their cave walls! Last year I didn't get to do a cave art project with the students because they breezed through the unit in social studies and started right in on the Ancient Egyptians. This year, I made sure I started this early, so as we have finished this up in art class, the students are just starting cave art in social studies...perfect timing! Tomorrow is parent-teacher conference night so we managed to get this done just in time. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the paper into those nice display strips I bought last year through the Parent's Association, but they were still useful to tape up the cave walls on. (The crinkled paper just wouldn't slide in the strips!) This project took us a total of about 2 1/2 class periods to complete. On the first day, which was essentially the half day, I showed my power point about prehistoric art and we did the virtual tour of Lascaux Cave on the smartboard. On the second day, we unrolled and took a huge sheet of brown butcher paper outside on the sidewalk. I had the students all line up on both sides and in pairs. Then then slowly crinkled and unfolded the paper to give it physical texture. Next, we took natural colored chalk that I have and rubbed it all over the wrinkled paper. Using paper towels, we wiped it to blend all the colors together. One class did a better job blending the colors than the other, but then the other class did a better job (in my opinion) of filling their cave wall with large cave paintings! On the third day, we took about 15 minutes to talk about and mix our egg yolk tempera. I gave each table four cups. One had pigment in it, two were empty, and one had the egg yolk. I sent one person to the sinks to fill one empty cup and get a paint brush for mixing. In the other empty cup, I asked them to fill it about 2/3 full with the powdered pigment I gave their table. Then, they had to slowly add water to create a paste, about the consistency of tooth paste. Lastly, I had them add the paste mixture to the egg yolk, mix and shake. I added these signs on the wall across from the cave walls... My first year of teaching, I actually set up a real "cave" for the cave art we did. That year, I had the students rip the edges and then crinkle Manila tag board. We painted them with tempera and then quickly rinsed the tempera off the paper before it dried. This created a similar effect to the chalk. That year, we didn't make our own paint. Then, I also had the students use chalk and paint on rocks to create a painting on an actual rock. I set up my easy-up tent in the media center (I only put it up about half way) at our school and then attached blankets all the way around. I pinned up all of the cave art inside on the blankets, laid the rocks down at the bottom along the edge of the blankets, and then set a lantern on the outside so people could crawl in like a real cave to view the artwork. It was a huge success, but A LOT of work! I set it up the next year for our art show as well (if you check out the 2012 Art Show page, you can see two pictures that sort of show the cave. One shows a "cave man" inside the cave (it's a dark photo) and the other shows our other "cave man" standing outside of it!)

4th Graders created these cave paintings using oil pastels and water colors. I purchased cave stamps and some of the students used them in their paintings. We looked at the cave of Lascaux' virtual tour and studied several different sections of the cave. We studied the animals and symbols found within several prehistoric painted caves. The cave above was created by 5th graders.

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: http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/?lng=en#/fr/00.xml (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.... Great sense of motion in this one!

Suomesta on löydetty vajaat sata esihistoriallista kalliomaalausta. Jopa 3000 vuotta ennen ajanlaskumme alkua punamullalla maalatut kuviot esittävät esimerkiksi hirviä, veneitä, verkkoja sekä samaaniksi tulkittuja sarvipäisiä ihmishahmoja.

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: http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/?lng=en#/fr/00.xml (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.... Great sense of motion in this one!

Archaeologists from the University of Tübingen have found an ancient fragment of ivory belonging to a 40,000 year old animal figurine. Both pieces were found in the Vogelherd Cave in southwestern Germany, which has yielded a number of remarkable works of art dating to the Ice Age. The mammoth ivory figurine depicting a lion was discovered during excavations around eighty years ago.

The Lascaux caves are a complex of caves found in the Dordogne region of southwestern France containing a sensational collection of Palaeolithic cave paintings estimated to be up to 20,000 years old.