Draft: this lesson was written with AI help and has not yet been read by a human editor.
1 What your class asks
This lesson asks you to use a variety of materials, tools, techniques and technologies to find solutions to design challenges. Making is your class's work; the museum links two records on how Persian painters prepared their colours and copied their outlines, for your class to learn from. The colours in the first record are historical materials, not for use in class. 1
Curriculum expectations, with their official codes
- D1.4 use a variety of materials, tools, techniques, and technologies to determine solutions to design challenges […]
2 The lesson
What does a material allow, and what does it cost?
Look at the expectation: it asks you to choose materials, tools and techniques to meet a challenge. For each choice, ask what it makes possible, what can go wrong with it, and whether another choice would serve better.
Go deeper
The record on Persian painting reports how Norah Titley describes the making of gold leaf. Pieces of gold were placed between layers of deerskin, sometimes two hundred or more, and pounded thin 2. The leaf was then rubbed or pounded with glue into a paste and put in water. The sediment was mixed with glue and saffron, brushed on and burnished with agate, and silver was added for a greenish gold 2. Titley adds that the cost of pigments and gold was one reason only the greatest rulers could maintain academies 2.
Think about it
Gold leaf began as pieces of gold pounded between two hundred or more layers of deerskin 2. When you choose a material for a design challenge, how much should the work of preparing it count, and what else would you weigh before you decide?
Into the museum
- Pigments and gold in Persian painting: how mineral colours were ground, washed and bound, and how gold leaf was made.
- Pouncing in Persian painting: how an outline was pricked through deerskin and dusted with charcoal to copy it.
Try this
Read Pigments and gold in Persian painting and Pouncing in Persian painting. Choose a design challenge of your own and list two materials or techniques from your classroom that you could use, with one advantage and one risk for each.
3 Carry it further
Where this lesson leads in the museum.
4 Check yourself
Nothing here is marked or sent anywhere. It is for you.
In your own words: what does Pigments and gold in Persian painting have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
Colours ground from minerals. Pigments in Persian painting were mostly mineral: the mineral was ground to a soft powder on a hard stone, sifted, washed and mixed with egg-white, glue or gum arabic, as Norah Titley describes. Blue came from lapis lazuli, lightened with ceruse white. Copper green, verdigris, is for Titley a conservationist's nightmare, because the paper becomes brittle and drops out leaving a hole. These are historical materials, not for use in class. How did the painter's choice of material shape the page?
In your own words: what does Pouncing in Persian painting have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
Copying with a pricked outline. Pouncing was a way of copying part of a composition: deerskin was laid over the original and its outline traced, the line pricked with a fine needle, then the pricked skin laid on the paper and charcoal dabbed on it from a mesh bag, leaving a guiding outline. Titley notes that styles of different schools and periods may occur in one late sixteenth-century manuscript. Which technique would you borrow to repeat a shape?
I can now