Aboriginal Art and Boomerang Studies

Explain the purpose of the activity

For some time now we have been looking into Aboriginal Australian art and leading on from that we looked into boomerangs. Eventually, we designed our own using aboriginal symbols to tell a story. I chose to tell a story about myself and how I see myself in some aspects.

Explain the story on your boomerangs, including the meaning of the colour

Given pre-cut boomerangs we painted a side per period. The first side I painted was planned, yet not very clean. On the corner of the boomerang, I have six yellow circles. Three large circles and three smaller circles, these are meant to look like the sun somewhat and represent the members of my closest family, including myself, my parents, my two brothers and my sister. Further along the wood, I have a black curving line each side, these are meant to look like snakes. I painted these because recently I have been thinking how cool it would be to have a pet snake, especially one of black colouring. In between these two, there are two white half circles on opposite sides. These show white clouds, mainly because of how I daydream a lot. At the very ends, there are blue crosses going over each other. These are meant to show water or streams. I have two reasons for these crosses. The first is to do with the rain, I love listening to it, its something extremely calming to me. The second reason is because of a stream. I've always found watching or listening to a river as it flows by to be interesting and therapeutic. The blue colouring seemed like a natural choice for the symbol it represented. The brown and white dots across the rest of the boomerang are merely a design choice to make it appeal to a more aboriginal feel.

The second side of my boomerang was unplanned, as I did not think I had to paint it. Yet, it seems to be the cleaner and more pleasing side. Taking up most of the boomerang, there is a dark blue background dotted with white stars, and more noticeably a moon in the centre. This is meant to parallel the opposite of the boomerang and represent that behind a strong and close family there are many challenges and people that brought us all closer together. As this took so much time and detail, the black and brown sectors are as well a design choice.

What went well when painting your boomerang

Painting the second side I was able to get cleaner lines when I used tape to prevent paint from going over and ruining other paint. This made it appear nicely done and carefully painted, even though it went heavily unplanned.