The modern day artist has an almost unlimited number of pigments to choose from for his or her palette, but some of the first artists had no more than four pigments at their disposal. Our artistic ancestors created their palettes from pigments found in their Neolithic neighborhoods. They gathered earth pigments, soot from burning animal fat and charcoal from the fire. The colors were yellow ochre, red ochre, and bone black. They used water as a binding agent which allowed the pigment to be sprayed from their mouths or painted onto a surface using their fingers as brushes. The photo shows bison painted on a cave wall in Altamira, Spain and below the stencil of a hand from Avignon in France. These paintings are more than 30,000 years old while geometrical designs in the Blombos Cave in South Africa were painted about 70,000 years ago
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Paintings of bison in the Altamira Caves, Spain
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| Hand stencil from the cave at Avignon, France. |
