HIP HOP HOORAY!

I have to say that this is a good week! I am celebrating my birthday (which we are not going to discuss how old I am getting) and A Handcrafted Affair is also celebrating it's 6 month anniversary! Not to mention that this is also the first full week of spring and Easter is right around the corner. Pretty good week, right?!?

So, in preparation for this celebratory week I thought it would be the perfect time to finally get started on the paper mache craft that I have been eager to test out. I love West Elm's paper mach animal sculptures but thought it might be a good idea to start out with a simpler form and with it being so close to Easter I immediately wanted to create some bunny ears. 

I bought Jonni Good's book Make Animal Sculptures with Paper Mache Clay and found her tutorials and recipe super helpful and easy to follow. She also has her Paper Mache Clay recipe on her site so you can get her complete directions there for creating your own batch of paper mache clay.

Jonni didn't have a specific tutorial for bunny ears but I took direction from her other tutorials and created a cardboard template of the ear and then layered wads of newspaper and masking tape to create dimension to the ears. 

Once I was happy with it's shape I stood the ears up on top of a piece of cardboard and traced around the bottom of the ears. I cut the base shapes out and taped them to the bottom of the armature. This will give your sculpture a nice flat base to stand on.

Next, it was time to cover the armature with the clay. I can definitely see how using the clay versus the paper strips and paste is much more intuitive to mold and create detail. It was similar to icing a cake!

Cover everything with the clay but the bottom of the bases and allow to dry overnight. You can also speed up the process by setting your oven to 200 degree F and drying them out in the oven for a couple of hours. I ended up doing 2 coats of the clay and I also lightly sanded any rough edges in between the coats.

To make the bottom of the base flat, put a piece of plastic wrap on a flat surface and then spread a layer of clay to the bottom of the ears. Stand the ears up, bottom facing the plastic, and push down to flatten the clay against the plastic. Slowly pull away the plastic and gently smooth out the transition between the bottom and the sides of the ears.

To seal the clay, you just need to apply a coat of gesso and once that has dried you can paint your paper mache sculpture with acrylic paint colors of your choice.

I'm super happy with how my bunny ears turned out and will definitely be making another paper mache sculpture soon! My 5 year old has requested a unicorn so we will see how well that goes. J

I hope spring is treating you well so far and thanks for stopping by to celebrate with me!! Have a great weekend!