Magic Marker Monday — Cave Paintings

"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

~Pablo Picasso

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At our house over the past few weeks, we've been taking a closer look at ancient art through our homeschool art curriculum with Artistic Pursuits and we started with cave paintings.

We had a lot of fun just doing a Google image search on "cave paintings" and then talking about the different drawings — what they looked like, how different it would be to paint on a rocky surface instead of on smooth paper, and what the artists might have used to draw and paint with. My six-year-old particularly liked the painting above, which was discovered in Lascaux, France by four teenage boys in 1940.

She was very excited to make a cave painting of her own!

Following the directions in our book, we cut a section of a grocery bag and crumpled it up to give it a "rocky" texture. Then we glued it to some black construction paper and got out some chalk pastels. We talked about the kinds of things that people had drawn in the cave drawings we saw and she noticed that they were mostly animals.

She decided to draw a bear, a porcupine and some flowers in her picture (I'm particularly in love with the porcupine!).

What about you? What has your little artist been up to this week? Link up and join in — we can't wait to see!

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