Animal on Arts

You enter the cave, walk through constrictions, crawl on hands and knees and come out, 100 yards later, into a dark room, a widening in the cavern walls, and see, if you point your lamp at them, some of the most beautiful animals ever drawn by human hand.

The very first art – maybe 20,000 years old – is some of the best, and what you have are pictures of animals. On the walls at Lascaux and Altamira in Europe, you find bison and elk, aurochs and rhinoceroses. When you find people drawn on the cave walls, they are hardly more than stick figures, but the animals are often so realistic you can identify them by genus and species.
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Animal painting offers great opportunities for the oil painter to explore oil painting techniques. This painting demonstration uses zebras’ stripes as a focal point.

Animal art, in this case, zebras, adds something extra to what would otherwise be an empty African landscape painting. The patterns on the zebras can be illustrated in the conventional way to build confidence in oil painting, but in this demonstration, the colours have been manipulated to offer an extra dimension.
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