Quick Paper Mache Tutorial and Project Life - week twelve

Project Life - week Twelve

This week is all about a project that my daughter has for school. This project was so huge that I had to call out the big guns (that's right GRANDMA!) Imagine your sweet daughter/son coming home all excited bursting to tell you all about their new project that they have to do at school. The conversation started something like this,

Daughter: "Mom Mom guess what we are going to do at school after spring break"

My response: " I don't know but by the looks of your happiness it must be something good",

Daughter: "Ya we are going to make our classroom into the rain forest and we get to pick an animal and make a presentation about the animal we choice"

My response: "Oh how exciting you love animals this sounds like something you'll be good at.

Daughter: "But I need your help"

My response: "Sure I would love to help, do you need me to help you research about different animals in the rain forest?"

Daughter: " No - I need you to help me make a animal"

My response: " Oh so you need to draw or look for pictures for this?

Daughter: "No - We each got to pick an animal and we have to make it 3-d life size.

My response: "WHAT" "

Daughter: "Guess what animal I picked?"

My response: " A frog?????"

Daughter: "No a Jaguar"

My response: "WHAT" How are we going to do that?"

Daughter: "Out of Paper Mac he"

My response: "I don't know how to do that"

Daughter: "Call grandma she'll know"

So I listened to my wise young daughter and picked up the phone and called Grandma. I begged her to come out and help us with this project and she ended up staying five days with us in order to complete this project. (thanks mom you are a life saver). So in case one of your lovely children come running up to you all excited I thought I would share with you how I tackled this project and since this project last five days and I didn't get to do much of anything else we will be included it as this week for project life.


Grandma to the rescue!



OK first I search the Internet to find a picture of Jaguar that was standing side ways and printed out on my home printer. Then I took that picture to a local copy place and had it blown up to two feet.



Then I took tracing paper and piece them together with tape, traced the jaguar and cut it out. I also made a tracing of the front and back legs too.



Then I went to Hobby Lobby and purchase a large thick poster board (my mom said it was called a pin board)



I traced the pattern onto the pin board and then cut it out using a craft knife and box cutter. Note: I cut out four legs.



Then I took a foam board and cut out four spacers.



I placed them under each leg and glued them to the body using white glue.





Then we took crumpled up newspaper and started to tape it the body and legs of the jaguar like this to fill out the body.



After all the news paper is in place on the body we taped the whole thing up so it looked like this.




Then we cut strips of paper and started to paper mac he the body. (I made my paper mac he paste with two cups of flour and two cups of water and a couple tablespoons of salt to keep mold away) We have about two layers of paper mac he strips of paper on the body. I used my old hair dryer to speed up the process. You need to wait for each layer to dry before you start the next layer.



After the body was dried, we started to paint it with craft paint that we picked up at the store.



Here is the final results. I know it doesn't look exactly like a jaguar but I think it turned out pretty good for a first attempt. Hopefully you guys will not have to go through such a project but just in case you do I hope this will help you. Now that it is done I done want to see any more newspaper, glue, or paint for a long time.