Lion head cut-out

A few weeks before my boy’s second birthday we went to the Alice in Wonderland theme park designed for kids up to 9 yo. He did all the rides, I was so shocked he wanted in all of them, even the ones he went alone into (he’s pretty shy about leaving maman in a new place).  One other thing he really liked was those characters where the face is cutout so you can stick yours in and take a photo.

I looked online for some of those but they were all around 50$ each (plus shipping)! Are you kidding me!? No way I’ll pay 50$ for a cardboard! But I still wanted him to have one, his little party (only 2 little girls) was jungle themed and he’s a leo so I thought I would make him a lion. Cardboard ok but you see the bumps, poster board too weak, so I thought about that poster board with foam, much stronger! Got 2 of those at the dollar store for 1.25$ each, so much cheaper than at the office supply store (4.50$ a piece!). Got me some craft paint, pencil for the base drawing and black markers. I taped both boards together horizontally so I would have a nice size. I found a cartoon photo of a lion on google images that I liked and went from there and free handed the drawing. I painted it all after it was drawn with a pencil, put 2 coats for better coverage. Then I did all the lines I had drawn with a pencil (now painted but it was basically where 2 colors of paint meet) with the black markers. Now black markers don’t like acrylic paint much, they tend to have it stick to them and not write so well after, so I used lots of black markers (I had a box of 12 so I knew I was good, no I didn’t use them all). To finish I used a box cutting knife and cut out the inside of the lion’s mouth. To give it more resistance and durability I used clear contact paper on the surface (the fun part was the around the teeth! Not!).

And voilà!

It was a simple project that took me about a week (of nap times/evenings) as I didn’t have space to leave it and had to put everything away every time my boy was up, so I skipped a few nap times. I was planning on doing a simple wood stand for it but ran out of time so I just held it up while daddy took the photos. I would like to do one for him every year that matches whatever theme he’s gonna be into, hope I can keep up.

If you do this, we’d LOVE to see a photo of it. Email it to us or post it on our Facebook page. We’d love to do a Facebook album, a Pinterest board and a page of your creations

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