Paper Mache Projects
Paper Mache Fossa Project
The fossa is a cat-like mammal native to Madagascar.
My 5th-grade daughter and I decided to try to create a fossa sculpture because of a school report she did on fossas. We were originally just going to make something small with clay. But our experience with clay is that it was very frustrating to work with and crumbled. (Even with an internal armature the results were not great. (We built some small maned wolves for a diorama in 3rd grade and the air dry white clay cracked when dry.)
I love the idea of paper mache, because of it's heavy use of recycled and free materials. So costs are SUPER LOW and it's good for the environment. And it is just AMAZING what you can create with it, especially with some of the techniques we learned (see Resources). Someone even built a life-sized elephant!
The fossa was the first paper mache project we ever did! Originally it was going to be a small, simple project. But after finding some really interesting resources online, we got inspired to try some "fancy" techniques to see what happened! And we went for life-size (about 18 inches tall). We wanted it to be somewhat realistic and capture the fossa's cute but intense expression. But we have almost zero sculpting experience.
As total newbies, we had to learn as we went. There were mistakes aplenty, and we learned a lot in the process. But we do like how he turned out in the end.
Here's how we made the fossa.
There's also a Shutterfly site with more photos during construction.
My 5th-grade daughter and I decided to try to create a fossa sculpture because of a school report she did on fossas. We were originally just going to make something small with clay. But our experience with clay is that it was very frustrating to work with and crumbled. (Even with an internal armature the results were not great. (We built some small maned wolves for a diorama in 3rd grade and the air dry white clay cracked when dry.)
I love the idea of paper mache, because of it's heavy use of recycled and free materials. So costs are SUPER LOW and it's good for the environment. And it is just AMAZING what you can create with it, especially with some of the techniques we learned (see Resources). Someone even built a life-sized elephant!
The fossa was the first paper mache project we ever did! Originally it was going to be a small, simple project. But after finding some really interesting resources online, we got inspired to try some "fancy" techniques to see what happened! And we went for life-size (about 18 inches tall). We wanted it to be somewhat realistic and capture the fossa's cute but intense expression. But we have almost zero sculpting experience.
As total newbies, we had to learn as we went. There were mistakes aplenty, and we learned a lot in the process. But we do like how he turned out in the end.
Here's how we made the fossa.
There's also a Shutterfly site with more photos during construction.