In 2nd Grade we began the year with a story that you can watch too!
Our friends at DSS taught us that Lascaux Cave is important for students to learn about because this famous cave contains some of the first drawings in the world! It shows that art was important even to people living long ago. The Cave Painter of Lascaux by Roberta Angeletti is a perfect literature tie-in for this line and texture lesson. It loosely tells the story of this cave’s history by connecting today with the past.
ABOUT LASCAUX CAVE
In 1940 a cave was discovered by teenage boys in southwest France. When they entered the cave, they were surrounded by paintings on the walls and ceilings. The paintings are estimated to be 17,000 years old. Most of these prehistoric paintings are of large animals, such as horses, cattle and bison, and were painted with black, red and yellow mineral pigments.
We also learned a bit from Rick Steves~
Our actual project began with crumpling our paper to create texture so it would better mimic the cave. Then we drew with oil pastel to create a prehistoric animal on our cave wall! Students were provided with a handout of 4 example animals but were allowed to choose a different animal if they really wanted. We talked about drawing "contour lines" and not adding many details since thousands of years ago drawing with a stick on the cave wall wouldn't have allowed much opportunity for details. We reviewed being careful with the oil pastel due to it being one of our permanent mediums. Then we talked about not trying to draw a whole character/animal we're looking at but instead covering the majority of the image and trying to look at small sections of line at a time to make drawing easier. It's much less intimidating to draw a curved line than a horse! After drawing our animals we learned about applying the lightest value of chalk pastel first, covering our entire animal and then blending. Then we picked the next lightest value to create shadows and our darkest color for added umph. Next, we used 2 super light colors outside our animal lines to create "emphasis," a principle that makes our Art POP. We finished up by retracing our animal for a completed project. See below for photos and "I Can" statements!
Today I will learn about LASCAUX CAVE, so that I CAN create my own CAVE ART inspired by the prehistoric drawings and paintings found on the walls and ceilings of a cave in France.
Today I will learn about TEXTURE, so that I CAN create TEXTURED PAPER to draw my animal on by crumpling up and smoothing out brown paper.
Today I will learn about LINE, so that I CAN draw the CONTOUR LINE of a CAVE ART ANIMAL. I’ll know I have it when my ANIMAL take up most of the space of the paper.
