[MUSIC] Welcome to the Crafts Around the World series. Today we're going to be traveling to Australia, the smallest of the world continents. And we're going to be learning about the aboriginal dot painting. To do this simple craft, you'll need to get your supplies. And those would include the wooden dowels. And I would recommend getting a variety of sizes. So you can make different sized dots be really creative with your design. You can even purchase some sponge daubers. These work quite nicely. You can even use the end of a pencil if you wanted to. You can get toothpicks to maybe do some really small creative design work. You'll need some paint brushes. And again, you can get a variety of paint brushes. It depends all on what you're going to do in your design. Acrylic paints. And today what we're going to do is we're going to use the "sacred colors". That is black, red, yellow and white. For example, these sacred designs that they used to do on the soil or paint on their bodies. When they used black, it represented the earth or the campfires of the dream time ancestors. And the red was for energy and blood. You'll need some water for rinsing out your brushes. Paint tray. You can use paper plates or whatever you want. I'm going to use this nice little, little tray. For drawing your design, you'll want either pencils or marker. And you can use for putting your design, you can get some wood, You can use a canvas, the variety of sizes of canvases, and watercolor paper. It's totally up to you what you're going to put your design on. I'm going to go simple and just use a nice round piece of wood. Trying to follow the nature. This is a sample of one that a student had done. And this is a sample of one done on canvas. If you're doing it on canvas, you might want to make the whole background black first using your brush. And then you can be creative with your design and in the various sizes of the dots and layering. So like you might put a white dot and once it dries, then put a smaller blue dot on top. You may want to do a little research and come up with that design, especially if you want to be following the culture and doing something sacred or representative of nature. The Aborigines, they use a lot of animals and mountains, rivers, the wind, nature. And, oh, you're going to want to put some plastic or something down so that you don't get paint all over your work surface. I actually have a puppy pad that I'm using. They work really well for absorbing the water and and keeping the paint off of the table. And I would recommend practicing. So this is a kangaroo. Kangaroo was very important to their Aborigines and you would see a lot of kangaroos in their designs. And that was because they were important, due to the meat and the hide of the kangaroos. So we're going to do a practice on this paper with our kangaroo. And we need to first put some paint in our tray. The black for the earth, red for the fire. Yellow. You can use a variety of colors. You can make it as colorful as you want. Be creative with your design. And to start, just to get to know what sizes with your dowels. You'll just dab it into your paint. And then this is where the practice comes in because you can see how much paint on your dowel, what the dots will look like. If you put too much paint or not enough. Of course you want a nice flat surface to do this. What's nice with the dowels is you can just flip it over and then use the other side. So that's what my red's going to look like. I like that. And then you can just stick them in the water or you can let them dry. That's one of the nice things too, once they dry, they they're still able to use them. They don't stiffen up like a paintbrush does. So this makes a little bit bigger circles. I kinda like that. So now that I've experimented, we can move on to doing our design. And I really emphasize creativity. You can, if you do your research, the Aborigines were very fascinating with their, their dot painting. And their, their sacred designs. But we're going to, I'm just going to do a little freestyle with my design. Now I could paint this all black, which would work out well with, with my white on top of the black. But, I'm not going to do that. So I'm just going to use my red... and put my dots on. [silence] And let the design form on its own. So I'm going to let that dry a little bit. And then show you on this one. You can see we painted it all green and she did the turquoise and the white dots. I'm going to experiment and get a smaller dowel. And now that it's dry, put a dot in the middle of the white. And then, with the white on the darker. I'm going to put dots. So you can layer quite a few colors with the various sizes of your dots. If you do some more studying, you'll see this is very similar to the dot-ism. Pointillism art. Ooh, let's add some red. Lets add some fire to this. And have fun with this. Let the creativity flow. It's art science. Ask some questions. Make some discoveries. If you blend certain colors, what color does it make? So a very simple craft. Lot of fun. Enjoy. [MUSIC]
Aboriginal Dot Painting
From Janis Brinn December 14th, 2020
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