How to Make African Reliquary Figures Part 1

These interesting looking figures here are what we called Reliquary figures. They come from Africa from the Kota people in the country of Gabon. And a reliquary is actually a compartment or a little opening inside of a statue that is used to house a relic. A relic is a piece of clothing or a part of a human body that’s been preserved from somebody who is saintly or famous or has passed on. Typically inside of a reliquary you might find something like piece of hair or some bones or a piece of finger nail or a piece of some clothing. These reliquaries are actually placed on top of the basket or a box that has the bones of an ancestor or somebody who has passed away. We’re going to make these today and we’re going to use a variety of materials to make this. We’re going to be using our tooling foil, you’re going to need some oil pastels, you’re going to need some paint pens, you need pencil and scissor, and sketch paper, some construction paper preferably black, and some transfer paper. So let’s go ahead and get started and while we’re working I’ll continue to tell you a little bit more about this reliquary figures. Reliquary figures typically have oval shaped face. They have a headdress. They have some kind of hair style. They have earrings, a long neck and they have this diamond shaped body that represents kind of arms, legs and body all in one, and then they have some kind of a little stand at the bottom that would sit on top with the basket or the box of bones. So we’re going to go ahead and start I’ve pre-cut some sheets of sketch paper and the same size black construction paper and these are actually 9 x 24 inches, so it’s come out in 18 x 24 inch piece of paper that’s been cut in half lengthwise. So the first thing I’m going to do is I want to leave enough space here for a really cool headdress, so I’m going to do an oval shape and try and it get in the center of my sketch paper and the bodies are usually pretty short and the head takes up a lot of space and that headdress takes a lot of space. So I’ve placed the oval in the center here and half way across the oval, I’m going to do a line that’s going to represent where the eyes are going to go. Okay, because when you draw faces the eyes usually go about halfway across the head because you have to leave room for the forehead and hair. So we’re going to put some eyes here and then just lightly going to sketch, and a nose, and a mouth. Now these figures the reason they sit on top of the basket and the box of bones is because they are meant to scare away evil spirits and to keep witches away from the bones of the ancestors. It’s to protect their soul, so sometimes the faces are a kind of scary. And we’re going to make this one extra special scary with the mouth open and teeth showing. I’m going to put some eyelids on here, and these faces typically the reliquary figures have some kind of a panel drawn down the center of the face. They can be either straight panel like this or it can be something that looks like a cross. So you’ve got some choices here you can do them either way. And you can even do other variations whatever you come up with this is fine, okay. Now we’re going to go ahead and create some kind of a headdress here. And I think some after cool designs usually works the best. So as you start to create this think about the wings of a butterfly and how they’re the same on both sides. Now I’m going to do something here with creating some kind of a hair design trying to keep it symmetrical as I’m working. Now these reliquary figures typically have some kind of designs that looks like jewelry. A lot of these groups in Africa decorating their bodies very important, okay jewelry, braiding of the hair, a lot of times they spent on creating those kinds of adornments. Okay, now we’re going to work on the neck. Typically the people, the Kota people will have a lot of jewelry draped around their neck, so when we draw this necks, we’re going to indicate that we’ve got lots of different kind of necklaces around their neck okay, so we can do that by doing this. So kind it looks like they’ve got rings and then later we can put different kinds of designs here. Draw it like that just so you get the idea of what we’re going to do here. Okay, now comes the diamond shaped body and the little stand. Okay, so here’s our basic outline for our design. And what we’re going to do next is work on the face which is going to be made out of the tooling foil, okay. So just for a little variety here instead of using the aluminum or silver colored tooling foil. We’re going to use this topper okay and actually this is reversible, so I’m going to cut out a piece and when you’re cutting the foil, you have to be very careful because it is very sharp. Now, we’re going to move this over and we’re going to need some padding because when you work on tooling foil you need some padding underneath so that the foil can stretch a little bit. So we don’t need the transfer paper yet, all we need to do is trace over our face with the pencil, and you want to press hard, so that the basic design transfers. Okay there we go, it’s transferred. Alright, now what we need to do is go over directly on the tooling foil, so we’re just going to press these lines deeper, so that they’re really indented. And of course the really fun thing about the tooling foil is that you can make areas pop out and areas be indented okay. Let’s just called repousse and the way you do that is if you want things to pop out you work on the back side. If you want things to be indented you work on the front side. Now you’ll notice on these ones that I already made that there’s kinds of textures—there’s lines, there’s designs, there’s dots. Now there’s actually a reason for all of that. Those actually represent—those lines and designs represent what we call scarifications. The Kota people cut designs on their skin. They do them on their faces, on their wrists, on their arms and they cut them until they bleed. And then they will use a special mixture of herbs and kind of like of mud pack and they will pack the scratches and keep them covered for several days. And when they removed the special mixture that they’ve created, it will leave the scars in the shaped of these different designs that they’ve actually drawn on their skin. And you’ll see the scarifications—they actually make a special kind of scar called the cheloid, and some of you if you’ve ever cut yourself really badly and you’ll see a scar, it kind of lifts up and it’s a little bit white, well the same thing happens with these people and they make this beautiful designs on their skin. So if you can picture these people with these beautiful designs all over their faces and their arms and their chest and their legs and then they have all this jewelry and then their hair is decorated in this beautiful braids and beads, you’ve got some pretty fancy looking people. So we’re going to go ahead and put some cool designs on hair. And right now I’m doing everything on the front but soon I’m going to flip over and do some drawing on the back side, so that we have some areas that pop out, okay. And what I’m doing is I’m drawing lines between the ones that I did on the front side and do the same thing on this side. And then we’ll really do some popping out on the eyes. I’ve got a lot of different designs here, scarifications now. And if you just work on the back side and just color in an area, you can get things to pop out, and then if you come on the front side and just go around it, it makes it even more dimensional. So now I’m going to work on these eyes and my plan is to flip it over and work on the back side on his eyelids, and make them stand out on the front side. So basically, what I’m doing is just coloring with my pencil and sometimes you’re going to get areas where the foils are going to kind of—it bunched up and what you’re going to so is take your pencil and carefully kind you just push those down and then color back over them. When you start doing the popping out you want to make sure that your pencils are a little dull and that’s probably is going to happen naturally from all the drawing that you’ve done, but you certainly don’t want to use a real sharp pencil because you can pop right through the foil. Another thing is the more paper padding you’ve got underneath, the further the foil will stretch. You also notice I’m using my eraser here to kind of smooth out area that I’ve popped out and actually I’ve pop through a little bit but that’s okay. Now I’m just going to go back on the front side and push this down a little bit, and push the eyes, and don’t worry if you popped through. It doesn’t really matter. It’s not going to ruin the project at all. It just makes it look like a little bit more interesting, and make some look older. In there, it’s popped out a little bit, so just push it with the pencil, a dull pencil. Use the eraser to smooth that out then flip it over and gently press underneath so it stands out a little bit. This one turn out a little bit better. And then I’m going to push the eyes and see if I can get—carefully maybe a pupil to pop out here, but you’ll notice I’m going real slowly so that I don’t punch a hole right through the back. It worked. So now we have pupils, I think what I’m going to do is color in between the lines and we’ll see how that works. You know, when you start working on these you can always draw ahead of time everything you want or you can do it directly on the foil or you can do a combination of both because as the artist you can make changes as you work and you can add things. You know if you think there is not enough design, you just go ahead and add some more lines like I’m doing here. Okay, I think it’s finished.