How to Make a Chinese Dragon Puppet

So I thought the Grade 3's should make a Dragon Puppet for Chinese New Year. They are learning about traditions and celebrations so this seemed to fit.

I original wanted to post this last week but life got in the way with doctor appts. and dentist appts. so here it is now.

This is quite a photo intensive tutorial but don't let that scare you off the results are worth it.











Part 1: Paper mache

Materials Required:

- duct tape..you can use plain old masking or cellophane as well
- cardboard egg carton
- piece of flat cardboard...like from a box
- newspaper or newsprint
- empty frozen juice container
- white glue
- recycled yogurt container to hold glue mixture
- paper towels




Take your egg carton and cut the lid off from the egg compartments.







Cut the lid in half and then cut out 2 egg cups.





Staple the cut ends of the lid like this.




It should now look like this.



Take one page of newspaper or newsprint and roll and crumple into a shape like this. It sort of looks like a snakes head.




Using tape attach it to the top of the lid like this.




Add another piece of tape to the front to make it secure.



Attach your egg cups to either side of your head to look like this.

It doesn't have to be pretty just secure.


This is the upper head of the Dragon.



Take your flat cardboard and cut a lower jaw. Again it is shaped like a snake head. I used my upper head to measure how big to make this.



Take your frozen juice container and cut down to the bottom. Gently pull the bottom away from the sides.





Cut the cardboard side piece into two.




You should have three pieces now.




Take a quarter of a page of newsprint and make a roll long ways. Tape together.



Tape onto your bottom jaw to make a gum line. This gives you a space to attach some teeth later.



Mix up some white glue with water, about a 50/50 mix.

Tear up some paper towels into strips.




Begin paper maching. For the frozen juice container piece, coat fully with two layers of mache. Make a lump of mache in the middle of the inside. This will give you a place to attach the stick later.



On the outside you can make some bumps for your dragon if you want. This is his back.


Make sure you "tape down" your bumps with strips of paper mache that overlap onto the main section otherwise your bumps will just fall off.




Mache your lower jaw, giving it two coats to cover.




Mache your upper head. Try to cover all areas. I added some bumps for nostrils on mine.




On the underside make a lump of mache at the end close to where you stapled this piece. Again this will give you a place to attach your stick later.


Place all pieces on wax paper and leave in a warm place to dry. Turn them after a day so they will dry on all sides.


Part 2: Batiking the Dragon Skin

Materials Required:

- Elmer's washable blue gel glue (you can use the clear but it will ooze more so you will loose definition in your design)
- piece of fabric about 6 inches wide and 20 inches long
- wax paper






Draw on with glue a scale design for your dragon skin. Follow the directions from my blue glue batik tutorial if you are not familiar with this technique.


Let dry.


Part 3: Painting

Materials Required:

- acrylic paint for the fabric
- tempura or acrylic paint for paper mache
- paintbrush
- water




When your paper mache pieces have dried paint them completely with the colors and design of your choice.

I decidied to use traditional colors for mine.





Paint your fabric as well with watered down acrylic paint. Let dry, wash out the glue in warm water. Dry again.

Part 4: Assembly

Materials Required:

- glue gun or tacky glue....I used the glue gun because it was faster. Remember to only let an adult use a glue gun, kids ask your parents for help with this part.
- two sticks..I used chopsticks from the dollar store
- white foam for teeth
- red felt
- any trims you want for embellishing
- scissors





Take your white foam and cut out some teeth shapes.

Glue to the inside of the upper jaw.

It should look something like this.

Glue some teeth to the inside of the lower jaw.

Taking an awl or knitting needle punch a hole thru the end of the lower jaw like this.

Make a hole in the upper jaw like this. Don't go all the way thru just even to hold your stick in place.

Make a hole in the back piece thru the lump you made, again don't go all the way thru just enough to hold the stick in place.

Push one stick thru the lower jaw hole.

Put some glue in the hole in the upper jaw and place end of stick that has the lower jaw on it in place.

Hold until glue sets up.

It should look like this.

Cut a tongue piece from the red felt.

Attach the straight end to the upper jaw like this using glue.

Glue the rest of the tongue in place in the lower jaw. This part is a little tricky but you'll get it.

Lay your dragon pieces on your dragon skin and figure out where you want it to go.

Cut the fabric where it will attach to the back piece. I left the tail piece to be longer.

Glue the short piece into place on the inside of the back.

You can trim it to fit or gather it to fit whatever look you prefer.

Glue other end of the short piece of fabric between the upper and lower jaw pieces.

It should look something like this.

Cut your longer piece to taper at the end like a tail.

Attach to the inside of the back piece with glue.

Glue second stick into place into the hole in the middle of back on the inside.

Hold into place until glue sets up.

If you wish you can add some embellishments. I put a fringe on for a beard.

I also put some trim on the eyebrows of my dragon.

That's it! A working dragon puppet. Well worth the effort. I can't wait to see how the Grade 3's will turn out. They are currently at the painting stage.

see you next time

gail

Unexpected Day Off

Well.... one son at home with a sty so that means my art classes were cancelled for the day. Too bad I had all the prep done for the Chinese Dragon puppet. Can't even post it yet as I need the sample unpainted until after the construction phase is done. Oh well hopefully by Wednesday.

So what to do..what to do...


Worked on my daily painting practice.



Still working on those water reflections.






















Started designing some Valentine's Day ideas. I usually have to get these done early as we take our annual winter vacation over Valentine's.

Haven't embellished them yet but if you are interested here is the template.





Otherwise just planning out projects for the next few weeks. Came across a great paper mache Penguin project I am going to do with Grade 1. Hope to post our results.

later

gail

Penguin Printmaking

Well it seems penguins are all the rage at school. Both kindergarten and Grade 1 are doing penguin units....with all the snow we have had I guess its appropriate.

Here is a Penguin Printmaking project. I have seen this on a few other blogs but when I first started doing this my reference was the Usborne "Christmas Activities" book. Usborne has some good art books out there but keep in mind that they tend to repeat projects in other books in their series. I got most of mine thru the kids Scholastic program at school.

Materials Required:

- blue, black, white, and orange paint, we used liquid tempera

- paper

- dollar store sponge

- potatoes

I taped 11x17 white sketch paper to our art boards. I like to take the time to tape for 3 main reasons:

- it holds the sheet down for the kids so it doesn't move while they are painting

- it decreases the amount of rippling in the final product...just keep it taped until fully dry

- it provides a nice mat effect for the final piece

Paint your page completely with the blue paint. We used large brushes. Lee Valley has a brush set that is inexpensive and works great for as a school set.

I took the dollar store sponge and cut some long rectangular pieces.

Dollar store sponges are another terrific painting supply. You can wash them out and use over and over again. I buy packages of 6 for $1.00.

Sponge on the ice and snow with the sponge. I explained to the kids that the penguins needed somewhere to stand. They really used their imagination at this stage. We had igloos, hills, ski jumps. snow slides, and lots of floating icebergs.

Now it's time for the potato prints. We used med sized potatoes. I wanted small and large sized penguins. You need two sizes for each penguin. One for the full body and one for the belly. Following the book's advice I cut little handles into the potato, don't skip that step as it proved to be terrific for those little hands. Cut your potatoes lengthwise and be careful to get a level cut. This will make the printing easier. You can also cut the potato width wise to get that smaller belly sized piece.

I used a foam plate. I know its not the most environmental friendly but it works well. The book suggested paper towel but I feared that would fall apart to easily.

Pour some black paint onto the plate, swirl your potato to make sure bottom is well coated.

Figure out placement and then press down for print. I let the kids do a practice on a paper towel if they wanted.

You need to stress that it is a print and advise them not to slide the potato around. Gentle pressure on the potato before lifting off.

Reload the potato with paint for each print.

When your penguin bodies are all in place you need to paint on your arms or wings.

We used paintbrushes. In hindsight I should of grabbed the smallest brushes we had, as it was they were using size 2 which are a quarter of an inch...we still ended up with some pretty large arms or wings.

I tried to get them to make only one pass of the paintbrush to make their arms and this seemed to work better.

Now let your painting dry especially the penguin bodies. For these tutorial pictures I continued on but you can see it gets a bit messy.

Take your belly sized potato and load with white paint. Make your penguin bellies.

I cut that Dollar store sponge into a triangle shape. Using orange paint make the feet of the penguin.

For the beak I made a smaller triangle shaped sponge.

For the eyes I used some daubers I had as well as a dowel. You can use the ends of paintbrushes as well as the ends of pens or markers for this. I wanted the eyes to come out clean so that is why we didn't use a paint brush. With kindergarten we would have ended up with some very large eyes otherwise as well as some frustrated kids.

Stamp on the larger white circle and then the smaller black center.

You can see in this picture that it got a little messy....your result will be better if you allow the black penguin body to dry fully first.

That's it. I have a large snowflake punch that the kids will use to punch out some white snowflakes and then will glue on with the glue stick. You can make some small paper snowflakes on your own or you could paint some on or you could glue on some snowflake sequins.

Another good option is to have the kids draw some on with white pencil crayon or gel pens. I wouldn't advise chalk as they won't be able to get a fine enough line for the snowflake.

Next week I'll tackle this same project with Grade 1 as well as start dragon puppets with grade 3 for Chinese New Year. I'll post the dragon tutorial next week. I'm planning on a paper mache, glue batik mix.

see you next time

gail

Calendar Portrait Studies

As promised here is another way to use those old calendars. They make great teaching aids for portrait studies. Often a student can get intimidated by trying to do a portrait, by giving them half the picture they learn placement by drawing/painting the mirror image. As they gain confidence you can go to a quarter page if you want. My kids love to do these studies. My youngest(6) does his in crayon and pencil crayon while my oldest(11) attempts them in watercolor.

Find a good image. This is from a local wildlife calendar the city sends out every year.

Fold and cut in half. Often the image is not centered on the page so try to find the center of the subject and make your fold there.

Glue on some paper with a glue stick. I did mine in watercolor as I was trying to get my daily practice in so I stuck mine on 140lb wc paper.

For my kids I usually use heavy sketch paper.

Do your sketch trying to get a mirror image. Hold on to the half you cut away for reference if needed. It's useful for determining shadow and highlight.

Add color by painting, using wc pencils, pastels, or even crayon.

Here is another example.

Give it a try. If you don't have an old calendar you can find lots of portraits on Google images.

We woke up to ice fog this morning. The trees were beautiful but we didn't get our blue sky today. Calgary is usually the sunniest place in Canada, (even though it's still cold).

see you next time

gail

How to Create Art with Old Calendars

Well I'm back....had a good break and I hope everyone had a great Christmas!

Back to business though, I usually don't do resolutions but I'm going to try hard to get that daily painting practice in as well as continue to create some great art tutorials for you.

Sorry I was unable to get the templates to work for the last post however THEY ARE WORKING NOW!! I know Christmas is past but the Snowman and Penguin are still applicable.

I love January for one main reason...old calendars, even new ones, I always tend to get a gazillion in the mail. Instead of putting them straight into the recycling bin take a second look. They are a treasure trove for the budding artist.

Great for reference photos and for teaching some basic art principles.

I have been drawing and painting for over 30 years and I still go back to these exercises again and again. Art like anything that you want to do well requires practice. This usually takes my students by surprise...they often think you are born with it........ While you may be artistically inclined you need to work hard and practice. That is what makes you a better artist. I just find art so much fun it doesn't feel like work.

Here is a picture stretching technique. It works well for all grades and abilities as you can easily increase the challenge if need be.

Lets get started.



Find a picture you like in an old calendar. Trim off the top to get rid of the little hole for hanging.

Take some white paper, I'm using 11x 17. You want your paper to be longer than your picture so you can stretch it.

Measure the height of the picture and cut your white paper so it is the same height.

Turn over your calendar photo and cut the picture into vertical strips. You can use the month grid to help you with this. Try to keep the strips in order or else you will be assembling a puzzle as well.

Lay out your strips on the white paper to get a feel for how you are going to stretch it. It helps if you anchor each end of the paper with a strip, put one in the center and then arrange the remaining strips from there.

When you have it the way you like glue them down with a glue stick.

Using a pencil, sketch in the gaps.












Now you can choose what medium you want to use to add color:

pastels

watercolor pencils

tempura

pencil crayons






I'm using watercolor pencils for this one.

The ones shown here are my expensive ones but I found some great sets for the kids at the toy store of all places. They came in packs of 24 and were only $12.00 each. That might still seem expensive but you can get a lot of painting out of these babies. The kids also have greater control with fine detail work.

Just remember some guidelines. You want to add water in small amounts and keep cleaning your brush as you go. You also want to let some areas and colors dry a bit before painting others otherwise your painting just mixes all together.












If you want to make this more challenging take out some of the strips.

For this one I am only using 4 instead of 7.

I decided to use tempura for this one.

It's amazing what you can come up with. This is student grade tempura on white cartridge paper using 2 brushes, a 3/4" flat and a small round both of which belonged to the kids.

A good color study technique for the more advanced artist

Give it a try and hold on to those old calendars. I have a few more projects to show you next time.

see you soon

gail