Old West Native American Trioramas

This week at Summer Art Camp our young artists built these impressive Native American trioramas. 

Campers got a peek at how North American Indians lived through 3-dimensional construction and assemblage of a native village. 

Our miniature scenes were created within a 3-sided display called a triorama. Ours were made from a piece of poster board cut to 14" x 18".  A slightly smaller triorama can be made from an ordinary piece of 12" x 18" construction or sulfite paper.

The triorama template we used calls for a square sheet of paper, but you can leave the excess (don't cut it off) to add a lake or an extension of land in the foreground, as some of our artists chose to do. Before assembling the triorama, we painted it, dried it, and glued it together.

We made our miniature objects with Kraft paper, cardboard, tissue and nature objects such as pebbles, twigs, and leather.

We made teepees, fire rings, canoes with oars, and wooden frames on which to stretch a buffalo skin or create a colorful weaving. 

We also learned about Native American symbols and inscribed some of them onto our miniature objects.

This project was a lot of fun! Young artists enjoyed working in a 3-D format with so many different materials.

Trioramas are a great way for kids to study and illustrate any subject, such as natural habitats, animal science, or to simply tell stories. They can be used to create a 3-dimenstional indoor or outdoor scene, and they can be attached back to back for a four different story scenes or learning sections in one.