Indigenous People of South America

Greetings to all my readers at ‘Anthropologist in Heels’! I have been Incredibly busy working on several new projects. All our current Washington State History lessons are updated. We have a new line of coloring pages available, indigenous people of south America and an new line of collaborative coloring pages for Polynesia, Indonesia, Micronesia, Melanesia and the south Indian ocean. Previously I wrote about a dangerous un-contacted tribe, The North Sentinelese. I may be creating some products about the Sentinelese, but what we really have done it the last few months is amazing.

I set out to create an entirely new set of coloring pages, indigenous people of south America. I pulled out my phone, a graphite pencil, sheet of paper and started sketching what i saw. my method of creating these coloring pages is to sketch what my eyes see. i consider the subject, the space, the movement and the context, then weave these into basic shapes. from there, the coloring pages emerge.

Creating these drawings is a labor of love and respect, a challenge to ensure each image accurately represents the culture it portrays. Indigenous people of south America was an entirely different proposition because they are very different from indigenous north Americans. I had to spend a good deal of time online researching specific indigenous groups of south America, from the Tupi to the Yanomami. I watched many documentaries about these tribes, and then decided that i felt competent do create coloring pages that are respectful to the culture and will look beautiful on classroom walls. While I’ve often focused on drawing artifacts and clothing, one thing I avoided doing was drawing images of actual human beings. there is something about seeing a child coloring the face of an important native American chief that felt off putting. When I decide what my subject will be, I look towards their arts and artifacts, The things they create tell us much about who the are, or were. With the Tupi people however, i did decide to draw the actual people themselves because i couldn’t see a better way to show the beautiful headdresses they make from the feathers of exotic birds.

Indigenous people of south America and Polynesia was my focus for the last three months. March, April, and May all of my artwork has been entirely south American, and it got to the point I was literally working on these during my lunch break. My first published South American work is the Tupi. Then I took all of my drawings, pulled them into Photoshop where I colorized them, and formatted them into clip Art. I am not sure if I will continue converting all of my drawings to clip Art because people just are not that interested in buying clip art these days. In my view, AI will cut the TPT clip art sellers revenue by a massive margin. if they don’t loose at least 70% of their income, i would be surprised. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

I will admit, these last few months have been very productive. I created several coloring pages, drew hundreds of images and created an amazing cultural collaborative coloring page featuring amazing posters depicting Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea, Polynesia, and even a Japanese cherry blossom collaborative poster. each set of collaborative coloring pages also comes with google slides. I thought that the google slides would be very helpful for teachers when giving the art lesson. Each google slides has a collection of cultural videos, realizing that a teacher wouldn’t play all videos, I set up a linked video library within the slides to help teachers quickly navigate to the video they would like to show their students as well as the color pallet associated with each culture.

Each set of collaborative coloring pages is specific to an indigenous culture, so i provided a color pallet students should reference when working on their pages. This will create a brilliant continuity for the finished poster. I was thinking that if any of my readers would like to have access to my Polynesia Google Slides, Which is one of my favorites, here is a link —-> Polynesia Google Slides

Please browse my Store and the New Collection. I am sure you will find something that works for your classroom bulletin Boards.

Naomi