Where are the practice cave drawings? How did they get good before drawing on the caves? Graham Turrell (9)

Cave paintings first appeared in a period called the Upper Palaeolithic: it was more than 40000 years ago! Because it was so long ago, it’s difficult to know who painted them and why they did it… But we think that they must have been artists in any case and that these paintings were not just for decoration: the caves in which they are found were rarely lived in so they were probably special places for special occasions or ceremonies.

At first, people were using their fingers to paint on the rock, but later, they started using tools such as pads made of moss or brushes made of animal hair. They were using different pigments for colouring such as clay ochre that produced red, brown and yellow, and charcoal or manganese for black.

The drawings were made in 3 stages: first, the artists would draw the outline with charcoal or manganese (there are also some instances where they scored the outline with a sharpened stone). Then they would colour it in with clay ochre or other pigments. Finally, they would shade and blur the edges to make the drawing stand out. There is only one place where a preliminary sketch was found: it is in a cave called ‘La Vache’ in the south of France. There, archaeologists discovered a thin layer of charcoal beneath the black pigment of the painting suggesting the artist had first made a ‘draft’.

If you’d like to show off your cave painting skills, you can have a go (need to insert link for new activity page)