Making Papier Mache Animals

 The wonderful papier mache tūī that accompanied me to the Imagine This! Festival at Porirua Library, was a huge hit with kids and parents. They were fascinated about how little it weighed and how life-like it looked. This lovely tūī was made by Meredith Thorpe, a Nelson-based artist. Parents and children asked me how to make a papier mache animal.

Meredith's Tūī

Tūī back view

The tūī looking out my window 

At the Imagine This! Festival

You can make all sorts of animals out of papier mache. Last year a friend set me a photo of her grandson Luca making a green gecko. Luca made this during lockdown. He used one of Ned's illustrations from Animals of Aotearoa to help him.

Luca painting his green gecko

What is papier mache?

The words are French and mean "mashed paper". Papier mache is the layering of paper and glue over some kind of frame or structure to create a sculpture. 

How to make a sculpture out of papier mache

1. Make a frame or structure in the general shape of the animal you want to create. If it has a round body you could use a ball of crushed up newspaper. If it's long and thin perhaps you could use cardboard rolls from the inside of toilet paper rolls. An odd shape could be made from chicken wire scrunched up. The inner structure is be a good way to make art from junk, perhaps using something that is non-recyclable and would otherwise have been thrown away.
2. Once you have created a structure, start layering on strips of newspaper or other soft paper with glue. Keep building this up in a way that creates the shape of the animal - thicker in some parts, thinner in others.
3. Let your sculpture dry between layers. This is a project for several days or even weeks depending on your patience and the level of detail you want to include. It's an ideal project for school holidays or lockdown, or simply doing a bit each day after school.
4. Once you've finished the shape and it's dry, paint it in the colours of the animal.

Tips 

It's a long time since I've made anything out of papier mache myself so I asked my artist friends for tips on creating animals.

• Make your sculpture strong by overlapping the pieces of newspaper, criss-crossing them to ensure the inner structure is completely covered. 
• Meredith suggests using wallpaper glue, but you could also make paste out of flour and water.

There are lots of You Tube videos and instructions online with lots of different techniques. Here are two fun projects:

• Here's the simplest papier mache project I found, this would be a good one for beginners https://www.handmadecharlotte.com/paper-mache-animals/
• Krokotak always has cool craft ideas. These instructions show how to create a skeleton structure for a dinosaur, they use PVA glue but you could use any paste. http://krokotak.com/2013/03/papier-mache-dinosaurs/

MORE INSPIRATION

Luca's finished papier mache gecko

A papier mache ruru made by Meredith Thorpe

Blue mushrooms and kiwi made by Meredith Thorpe

Many thanks to Porirua Library for the photo from Imagine This! and to Luca and Jane for the green gecko photos.

Meredith Thorpe is an inspiration. In 2017, she created a whole window display for Illuminate Nelson City in Whitcoulls based around my book "In the Bush: explore and discover New Zealand's native forests". It even had a glow-worm cave! Ever since then, her tūī has been keeping me company in my writing studio. Thank you Meredith.