I recently completed an Australian Aboriginal style painting project with my grade 7 students. We looked at examples of Aboriginal art, focusing particularly on the ‘dot’ painting technique. We then discussed the idea of animal totems and how animals can represent us. Each student then chooses an animal to paint and they were encouraged to choose an animal they felt they had a connection with.  We looked at how Aboriginal art shows animals in their most recognisable view points, for example a turtle might be more recognisable from above, whereas a kangaroo is more easy to see from the side. Some animals are shown in mixed view points. The backgrounds of these paintings are often made of patterns rather than realistic settings.

We also did some experiments in creating dots using different tools such as the reverse end of the paint brush, cotton buds, chopsticks and toothpicks.

Finally the students drew their chosen animal in it’s most recognisable form then they painted it using dots and lines.  We used acrylic paint for this as it has a solid consistency and strong colours (though it is tougher to clean up). Chopsticks and toothpicks can be reused until they break so we didn’t go through too many trees to create these paintings.

It’s a great project for getting students to see that many different tools can be used to create paintings and now my students regularly ask me for toothpicks when they want to paint very tiny details.

Here are some of the resulting paintings.