1. Gather the materials.
You will need:
- plier cutter
- plastic coated wire, 18 gauge
- newspapers
- masking tape
- brown paper shopping bags
- art paste
2. Cut your wire to 3 lengths.
The length of each of them depends on the desired end size, ours were about 12", 8", and 6". The 8" will form the head and the arms, the 12" will be the body and legs, and the 6" will be the thighs.
3. With the 8" one held in the center, form a loop and twist around it two or three times as shown:
Bend the ends of the wire to form hands.
4. Take the 12" wire and hold it at its center while holding the "neck" of the other wire that you had shaped into head and arms like so:
Twist each side around each "arm" to form shoulders. Make sure to twist both wires around each other, so it won't be wiggly. Decide where the waist is and twist the long ends to form body and legs.
5. Now take the third length, hold it at its center and twist it around the waist.
Twist it around each "knee" to form thighs (otherwise the body has a weird shape where the legs are sprouting in a triangle shape from the body).
6. Now you are going to start wrapping it with a dry layer of newspaper to give it some body.
Rip a few strips of newspaper, tape a piece of masking tape to one of those and tape it anywhere on the wire skeleton, start wrapping it all around the skeleton and secure each piece with tape as needed.
When you get to the looped areas (head and body) wrap around the loop and not around each wire...
The head is a ball of aluminum foil secured with tape (Sorry, don't have a picture of that)
7. Now you are ready to start the wet layers. Rip pieces of brown paper and dip each one of them in the art paste glue. For the art paste, I start with a cup with water and pour a tablespoon of powder each time. Let it sit for a few minutes and then stir it with a craft stick. The kids really like to make the glue. Some kids did not like the feeling of it and complain that it is itchy. I cook a flour glue for them. There are plenty of recipes on the web for a flour based paper mache glue. 3-4 layers of brown paper are enough to make it pretty stiff but the more the better.
The kids lose interest after 2 classes of doing only layers of wet gluey paper so we finished after about 3 layers. For the face we used a paper mache clay (A terrible material to work with, it is muddy and messy and hard to manage the right consistency but good for making face details).
After the brown paper layers dried completely, we used mod podge to adhere a layer of tan color tissue paper. I thought it will stiff it just a tiny bit more and that it will smooth the wrinkles and make it easier to paint. I think it served the purpose of it overall...some kids left it as skin color and some painted their own skin color. We then painted the figurines with acrylic paint, added props (Like skis, helmets, tennis racquet etc.) and some kids went on to add a whole environment, like a swimming pool for the swimmer...
