Next we’re going to do some drawings of animals but we’re actually going to do them in a style of the Aborigines people that live in Australia.
Typically, these are done on a piece of bark that’s been soaked in water for a period of time, and then flattened out so that it’s been like a piece of paper. Usually the bark takes on either reddish or a brownish cast to it.
So you have a choice here. You can use red construction paper or brown construction paper or I guess if you wanted too, you could use black and all you need is the construction paper, some lots of white colored pencils, an eraser, and probably a pencil just for sketching out the initial drawing.
What we’re going to do is first we’re going to create a border design taken from these pages that have typical Australian Aborigines designs that are used in a lot of different paintings and drawings and you can incorporate some of these designs into your border design.
For instance, there’s a symbol that means this concentric circles here it represents a water hole, a fire, a rock hole, a camp site, a stone, grass or a tree. Okay so just for fun, we’re going to start and I’m just going to do a series of concentric circles that are going to form the border of this animal I’m going to draw.
The Aborigines were the first group of people that inhabited Australia. And a lot of ways they share things with the Native Americans of our country. And their land was taken away from them or I should say they were forced to leave their homes and they’re sort of out there in the bush in Australia and they make wonderful art.
These bark paintings are actually done. They actually make a paint brush out of a twig and they shred it to where it forms a thin little point and that’s their paint brush and they used honey and a ground up rock and they draw or I should say paint. They mixed the honey and this ground rock which is reddish in color to make their paint, and they dip the twig that’s been sharpen to a point like almost the single hair on a brush and they paint these x-rays style drawings. And while they are sitting outside doing this, they’ll keep turning the bark and one of attributes of an x-ray style animal painting is that it has no fixed perspective. It just looks like the artist kept turning the page which is exactly what he was doing while he was working.
So sometimes it’s difficult to tell which is right side up and which is upside down, and probably to them it doesn’t really matter, so we’ve got lots of water holes here. Now you have to decide what kind of animal. I think I’m going to do here maybe since I have all these water holes, I should do some kind of a fish there’s actually a fish that’s lives in the certain streams in Australia, the barramundi, it’s kind of a red fish, might be a fun one to do.
Now just like the name “x-ray style” what you’re going to do when you draw—after you draw the outside outline of this animal, you’re going to have to make it look as if you’re looking at his insides while you’re looking at the outside outline of them. So it truly it supposed to look like an x-ray. Okay, so you can put a spinal cord in there and some organs and it doesn’t have to be realistic. You just use shapes to designate like his heart, his lungs, you know, a skeleton, okay.
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