How to make a Greek Vase Painting Part 1
We’re here to do a great project. What we’re going to do is a Greek painting. Believe it or not, the Greeks, their paintings were actually done on pieces of pottery.
They didn’t have any kind of canvas. They didn’t paint on walls, so they painted on their ceramic pots. And typically, the top portion of the vase would have linear designs on it that went around the actual vase and then in the center oftentimes there would be some kind of a figurative image and then again at the bottom they would repeat designs and patterns that went around the vase in concentric circles.
Subject matter for the vase is ranged from Greek mythology to gods being depicted, the Olympics, battle scenes anything that they wanted to communicate with the viewer was placed on their vase.
What you’re going to need for this project you’re going to need some black construction paper, white colored pencils, some scratch etch paper which is actually just like a white tag board that’s been coded with black ink. You can buy that in local art store, and you’re going to want to either go to our website and get the Greek patterns and designs off of there, and also the shapes and the different kinds of Greek pottery that there were, or you can out the DVD in your computer and just print out a copy so you have something to refer to when you start to decorate your vase.
So what I’m going to do here is I’ve got an 18x24 inch piece of black construction paper and of course, if you wanted to do a smaller version, you could use 12x18 sheet of paper. What I’m going to do in order to make this symmetrical is I’m just going to draw half of a vase. I think what I’m going to do is pick an amphora which is basically this design right here. It’s got two handles on it. The shapes of different vases depended on what was going to be inside of them. Some were for carrying water. Some were for storing olive oil. Some were for storing wheat and grains.
So what you have to do is you have to make certain that you’re drawing on the folded edge. You start it with the folded edge right here because if you accidentally start over here at the open edge and draw a half of your vase when you go and you cut it out you’re going to end up with two halves of a vase and you’re not going to have the whole thing. It’s like when you cut out heart you have to make sure that your drawing on the correct side.
So I’m going to put like a little lift up here in the neck of the vase. The Greeks for a period of time were doing what they called black on red or red on black pottery. They would actually used a black glaze and scratch some of the details of the designs into the glaze and let the red clay show through, and they would also used the red clay and actually paint the black areas on, so they came up with red on black pottery and black on red pottery. And you could do this with red construction paper if you want it too, and color with black Sharpies.
But I actually like the look of the white on the black because when we do the scratch board then you can scratch the areas and the white will show through, so it makes for a nice little contrast there.
So we’re going to open up our amphora, and I’m just going to go ahead and start with a squiggly line that goes across the top just like that. And then I’m going to do one on the handle. I’ll do one over here, and I want to go ahead and start a little tucker board pattern here. We finished the tucker board.
Now I’m going to start down at the other end and I kind of like work my way that towards the center, and I’m going to do a little dotted here. I’m thinking ahead, I think I’m going to do something like a combination of this one and this and this one. I’m just going to change it a little bit.
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