Ancient Art Styles: Egyptian Painting

This is one of four parts of one of my final projects for the semester. From my Art History class, I learned about the earliest styles of art from the prehistoric era up to the Renaissance era.

For my project, I decided to build a box with each side showing the different drawing styles.

3. Egyptian Painting
The Egyptians had a very systematic and organized way of drawing figures. They called it their "canon of proportions". They started by drawing a 9 X 18 grid. Every body part has a designated place on the grid. The height is 18 units, and 1 unit is equal to the width of a fist: [link]

These were some conventions of Egyptian art:
- Images based on memory
- Mathematical formulas determine proportions
- Space represented in horizontal registers (panels)
- Flat colors
- Use of the hieratic scale (importance of a figure determines his or her size in the picture)

Heads are shown in profile with eyes facing front. The neck, hips, and legs are also in profile with the torso also facing front. You can see the groundline of the image at the bottom.

_{Here's some more examples: [link] [link]}
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I also like to dedicate this to and his wife, , for inspiring me and giving me the idea of what to draw on the sides of the box: both of them drawn with each style. If you look at their drawings, *chibiBiscuit makes himself smaller and his wife bigger.

When someone appears larger in a picture, it can mean that that person is more important compared to the other figures shown there. That's called the hieratic scale and in my opinion, Chibi uses it in a very unusual but creative way to show how much he loves his wife.