Origins |
Fossils |
Dinosaurs
Cave Art |
Cave Painting Craft Activities
Prehistoric cave painting | Art & Craft: DIY 'cave-painting' | Dinosaur Party Invitations - 'cave painting' style
Cave art can be very sophisticated - to discover more, visit our cave art page.
Just like you, the cave artists painted what they saw. European cave artists painted animals more often than people. Recent discoveries show tht they painted stars in constellations - and one painting is an accurate map of the surface of the moon (as viewed from earth). Dinosaurs are featured on a few cave paintings throughout the world. This gives many evolutionists a problem, because the theory of evolution insists that humans did not evolve until long after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Many Christians say that this theory is incorrect (which is why the 'missing link' has never been found. It doesn't exist!) - and that people and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time. It makes sense that cave artists would naturally record dinosaurs along with bison, deer and other creatures they saw around them.
Cave art appears simple - at first glance! But look again. People and animals are all drawn with their body parts in the correct places - that's pretty clever. So to copy them you need to find some accurate pictures to follow when you start to design your own 'cave painting'. If you would prefer to copy some real cave paintings, search for "cave paintings" on Google Images. Rock paintings found in India and the Americas show very different styles - so use your own style if you like.
One of the most famous cave-paintings in the world is a sort of comic strip. The story is of a hunt, which starts on the left and ends with the capture of the prey in the final image, at the far right end of the strip. It's at Lascaux - and was discovered by four teenage boys in a true story of adventure . . . and of fame!
Cave Painting of a Bison at Altamira, Spain
Use a thin drinking straw and edible colours like beetroot juice or blackberry juice. You could also use food colouring, if you can find some that don't affect you badly. You're not aiming to swallow any, but you never know! But some colour in food - like beetroot, which is a very vivid red - can stain badly. Cover your clothes and nearby surfaces before you begin.
We'd love to see your 'cave art' creations, so please send them in by email if you have access to a scanner (or send a photo if you prefer).
If we receive enough 'cave art' pictures we'll make a special 'Cave Art Gallery' on the kids.inmatlock.com website.
The prehistoric Lascaux cave artists were creative and dedicated. They would walk 25 miles to collect art pigments. They developed several methods of preparing the raw materials to turn them into art materials. Iron oxide was easy - it could just be dug out of the soil and cut into drawing-sticks. Other materials needed harder work. To make a 'mortar and pestle, they would patiently grind out a hollow in a stone, and find an animal bone which fitted the hollow nicely. Then they could grind up various minerals in the hollow, without wasting too much. But the pigment usually had to be moistened. Sometimes the artist used his own urine, which may have helped to 'fix' the colour and make it more permanent. More pleasant moistening agents included water, vegetable juices, animal fat, bone marrow, blood or egg white. Some cave artists avoided the labour of grinding out a stone basin by finding big barnacle shells in which to mix their pigments - archaelologists have found such colourfully stained 'basins'. But at least one cave artist used a human skull, which made a colourful, if rather grotesque, archaeological discovery!
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.
