The Cave Artist’s Tool Kit

An examination of the tools and materials used for cave paintings during the Stone Age

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Have you ever used a shell or maybe a piece of charcoal to draw with at the beach? Scratched doodles into the surface of some limestone? If you have, then you’d be emulating some of the very first artists on earth. Well, for the most part. It turns out that the art of cave drawing was much more elaborate than you might have thought.

During the Upper Paleolithic period, nomadic tribes started to form semi-permanent settlements. The use of tools like fire and stone had long since been established, but up until that point, those things were mostly reserved for more technical manners like hunting. Once humans had somewhere to go home and relax at the end of the day, things began to change. Stories were told around the fire and recorded on the rock walls of their shelters. Lessons of their histories, their beliefs, began to pass down through families. Creativity bloomed. And over the years the materials, tools and techniques were transformed alongside those walls.

“All of the prints are negatives or stencils; created by placing the hand against the rock face and blowing paint at it through a tube made of bone.” (Cave Art Movement Overview, n.d.)

Pigments

Though these people’s imaginations were expansive, their color palette was mostly restricted to varying shades of red and yellow, umber, black, and white; 

• Yellow and red ochre were made from limonite and hematite respectively 
• Umber could be made from iron oxide or manganese 
• There were various ways to make black, such as charring organic materials, like bone or wood, or by using mined manganese dioxide
• Calcite, which could be found in limestone, marble, and shells, was used to create white. 

(Pigments Through the Ages – Prehistory, n.d.)

Large animal bones or stones were used as mortars to grind these pigments into a fine powder before mixing them with binding agents to create paint. (Pigments Through the Ages – Prehistory, n.d.)

The number of binding agents were numerous; cave artists would use water, plant extracts, urine, animal fat, bone marrow, blood, or albumen (which is a protein contained in egg whites) to seal pigments into the rock walls. (Pigments Through the Ages – Prehistory, n.d.)

Techniques 

For an art form that touched every continent but Antartica (Ehrenreich, 2022), it’s not surprising that many different techniques developed over time. Materials varied depending on the resources available in various parts of the world. But in every environment there remained a few staples, such as flint and stone, animal products, certain pigments, found materials, and human ingenuity. 

You see this when you examine the multiple ways certain materials were manipulated; 

• Fingertips, or pads of lichen or moss dabbed across a surface were used to cover larger areas in pigment. This could also be done by blowing paint through a hollowed out bone or reed stalk, similar to what we know as airbrushing. (Prehistoric Pigments, n.d.)
• Lines were created by clay rolled and dried to create crayons, or by twigs and bones sharpened to a point. 
• Feathers, fingers or fur were used to blend the pigments out even more. 
• Paint brushes were made from various animal products, like leg bones or by bundling animal hair together. 
• Abalone shells and shoulder bones were a favorite for use as a palette plate.
• Carving into the walls, bones or ivory was done with flint tools. Flint was sharpened by chipping at it with another rock, bone or antler. 

(Pigments Through the Ages – Prehistory, n.d.)

There’s something so primally satisfying about using found materials to create markings; an instinct which certainly developed from our ancestors, those cave artists that lived some 40,000 years ago. 

While researching this topic I was struck by how ingenuous these early peoples were, despite being so limited in the number of resources they could utilize. In their techniques we start to see the beginnings of chemistry, the beginnings of color theory and basic tools that we take advantage of in this day and age. It’s fascinating to think that this way of communicating touched every population on the planet around the same time, that humans realized the value of visual communication so early on in our history. The labor put into these paintings was immense, and required both time and skill, but the drive to create, to tell stories, was incredibly strong and made a lasting impression on the humans of today.

1. Nunes, R. M. (n.d.). Prehistoric hand paintings at the Cave of the Hands (Spanish: Cueva de Las Manos ) in Santa Cruz Province, Patagonia, Argentina. The art in the cave dates from 13,000 to 9,000 years ago. Adobe Stock. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://stock.adobe.com/bg/search?k=%22cave+of+hands%22&asset_id=382937031
2. Cave Art Movement Overview. (n.d.). The Art Story. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://www.theartstory.org/movement/cave-art/
3. Pigments through the Ages – Prehistory. (n.d.-b). Retrieved October 2, 2022, from http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/early.html
4. Reid, J. (2020, September 25). Fraser Woods Montessori School | Exploring Natural Pigments and Prehistoric Art Materials. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://fraserwoods.com/exploring-natural-pigments-and-prehistoric-art-materials/
5. Ehrenreich, B. (2022, August 30). ‘Humans were not centre stage’: how ancient cave art puts us in our place. The Guardian. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/12/humans-were-not-centre-stage-ancient-cave-art-painting-lascaux-chauvet-altamira
6. Ancient Paints & Pigments. (2022, June 12). Butser Ancient Farm. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://www.butserancientfarm.co.uk/workshop-calendar/2022/june/12/ancient-paints
7. Prehistoric pigments. (n.d.). RSC Education. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://edu.rsc.org/resources/prehistoric-pigments/1540.article