Now we’re going to come to the United States and we’re going to look at some indigenous people that were here long before the Europeans came, the Native Americans. And specifically, we’re going to talk a little bit about the Plains Indians and the kind of lifestyle that they led.
We’re going to focus in a particular kind of art that they used in a utilitarian kind of way. The Plains Indians followed the buffalo herds and like all Indians they had a very close relationship with nature. With the Indians, nothing was ever wasted. If you killed a buffalo, you use every part of it. You use it for clothing, you use it for your shelter, you use it t cover your shields. The Indians even used the buffalo chips for fuel. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to focusing the decorative nature of the shields. They also serve a really important purpose for the Indians way of protection when there were some skirmishes between different tribal groups.
So, what you’re going to need for this project is some brown cracked paper. This is actually the brown paper that they used to wrapped packages you know for the mail when you mail your packages. We’re going to need a scissors, probably your white colored pencils so you can sketch on the brown and it’ll show up, an iron believe it or not, some old pastels and some markers for the actual decorating. You might want some beads, feathers, I've got some twine here and a hot glue gun is a really good thing to have.
The last thing you’re going to need is a round piece of cardboard that you’re going to actually to stretch this crumble paper over, but first we’re going to need to change the look and the feel of this crumble paper. We’re actually going to crumble this paper and un-crumble it and believe it or not. What this is going to do is soften, its literally going to break down the fiber in this paper and make this a lot softer. And when we’re finished it’s going to have a look that looks more like an animal skin. We’re just trying to change the look a little bit.
Now, I'm just going to go ahead and iron this. You want to put the iron on maybe cotton setting; it doesn’t have to be real hot. I've done it several different ways, I've done it on low before, I've actually have done it in steam because there are lots of projects you can do that uses the crumble paper and you do the same process of preparing the paper. As long as you don’t hold the iron there too long you’re not going to burn anything. This is just warm; it’s not even really hot. Okay, so I'm going to turn this off.
I have my round piece of cardboard here. This is great; you can get this at like a cake-making supply place or a craft store where they might have baking supplies for decorating cakes and making homemade candy and stuff like that. what I'm going to do now is just lay this on here and I want to trace around the circle leaving myself about 4 inches or so because this excess paper is going to be used to wrap around ands overlap on to the backside of the shield. Okay so, I don’t know if you can see that but I've just traced it around here and I'm going to cut this out. And what’s going to happen to this after you’ve drawn on the piece of paper, you’re going to stretch this over to the cardboard form, okay.
Right now what I want to do is, on whichever side you want to be the front you wanted to juts trace around your circle so you know where the edge of your shield is going to be. So, I've got a white line drawn here. once again on our web site our on the DVD there are all kinds of Plains Indian design, different pictures that might be on a shield, there’s birds, heres a bear, here’s a hunting party going after a turkey. I've got a sheet that shows you different mammal tracks/animal tracks because if you have a hunting scene you might want to show the tracks of the particular animal that the Indian is hunting. There are lots of pictures of horses, there are Tipi designs.
One thing that’s kind of a neat symbol to the Plains Indians is just a simple handprint like this and often times on tipis or clothing, you’ll see just a big handprint or two big handprints drawn on the piece of art. What that symbolizes is actually called counting coup and what it means is that, that person was brave enough to walk up to their enemy and touch them and they lived to see the next day. So it’s like the highest form of bravery for an Indian is to touch their enemy and escape with their lives still. Now, I'm going to decide on some kind of a border design here, probably the most typical is the zigzag pattern but lets try a design like this.
So you want to do your sketching with a white colored pencil because it’ll show up a lot better than just your lead. Okay, finish the border and I think I'm going to do this interesting character here and then maybe put some stars around them. We’ll have to see but it looks like he’s ready for some kind of ceremony. I'm going to use some artistic lines and some leave a few things out only because I think if it gets too busy it might be difficult to tell what’s going on and one right there.
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