Aboriginal Dot Paintings

Today we had another successful ethnic art exploration at co-op: Australian Aboriginal Dot Painting. The original idea for this project came from the excellent elementary art blog artprojectsforkids.org . The snakes on the dark paper are renderings of a project from this blog. The 3-4th graders worked on these today.

I am also using the book Art From Many Hands-Multicultural Art Projects by Jo Miles Schuman. This book is very detailed and true to the real processes and materials used in ethnic art. It is full of ideas and projects and historical/cultural information. I am using it as a reference and idea book, and am generally developing my own simplified processes to make these explorations more accessible and attainable for our classes.

Today the 5-6th graders did a different dot painting project that I worked up from looking at Aboriginal paintings on line. The picture with the filled-in blue snake is the example I made to show in class. The large E's are not letters, they are symbols for bird tracks! Here is the process:

1. Aboriginal art is traditionally done on black or brown/red backgrounds. I used white paper today since we were going to use non-traditional pigments that would show better on white. We used large animal shapes in the Aboriginal elongated style. After making a simple sketch of their chosen animal in the middle of their paper, students outlined them with markers.

2. If desired, students could add some traditonal shapes such as campfire, fire, boomerang and animal tracks.

3. Q-tips were used to fill in with pigment to mimic the traditional Aboriginal dot style. We used moistened watercolor pigment (Prang box) to dip the Q-tips in. Several dots can be made per dip. Tempera or acrylic paints would also work well. This would be a neat project to try on smooth wood with acrylics. Very little paint is needed for lots of dots.

Familyfun.com also has a great Aboriginal dot project using paint sticks to make musical clap instruments. This is a favorite site of mine for high quality crafts projects. (Owned by Disney, so you know the quality will be good.)

Pictures from L to R, top to bottom: Claire F., Maria B-H., Emily W., Catie A., myself and Claire B.