Urban Animals - Art Gallery of Alberta

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program
Charcoal Cave Drawings K-6
Background
Begin by examining animal drawings found in a variety of prehistoric caves throughout
the world. Discuss with students that, in drawing the animals prehistoric peoples hunted,
the artists used simplified shapes and expressive lines to create their images. Such
techniques are similar to the basis used for the images by Jason Carter found in the
exhibition Urban Animals.
Cave artists applied paint to the walls in a variety of ways. They were as creative in developing
their techniques as they were in their illustrations. They used their bodies and whatever else
was available in simple ways such as finger-painting, brushing, smearing and dabbing, and in a
more sophisticated manner by stencilling or spraying. When large areas of colour were needed
they speeded up the work with pads of lichen or moss.
Blending Techniques used by cave artists:
Brush the colours carefully with a feather
Paint with paint brushes made from horse hair
Spray paint through the hollow bone of a bird
But cave artists weren’t satisfied with ‘just colour’. Cave artists blended colours together directly
on the wall, in various ways, to create more accurate or more interesting colours.
The Drawings
Cave artists weren’t satisfied with ‘just lines’, either. They produced a variety of expressive lines
by drawing with twigs, and if a line was particularly significant they planned it in advance,
marking it out with dots which they joined up later. They also used the natural hollows of the
stone surface to give a more 3D effect, planning their paintings in advance to take advantage of
the shadows produced by the angle of the incoming light.
Cave artists carried out their amazing art work in the darkness of the cave, illuminated only by
oil lamps, or sometimes by a shaft of light which might penetrate a cave close to the outside at a
certain time of day. Some of their paintings were on a huge scale. Ceiling paintings - which were
sometimes vast - required teamwork, and scaffolding structures to enable the artists to reach
the painting surface.
Student example of Lascaux Cave drawings
AFA Travelling Exhibition Program, Edmonton, AB. Ph: 780.428.3830 Fax: 780.421.0479
youraga.ca