The idea of converting thin sheet or cardboard material into a semblance of living images allows you to create many useful crafts. This article suggests several options for making a doll, fairy-tale character or animal out of paper.
Different use cases for ideas
Consider how and for what purposes paper dolls can most often be used. Below are a few options:
- Use of paper dolls by girls 3-8 years old. Children replace ordinary toys with them. In addition, a paper doll with clothes is much more affordable, and it becomes possible to significantly expand your favorite's wardrobe by making it yourself. Babies are happy to be creative (draw, cut, colorize). They create not only dolls, clothes for them, but also paper houses, furniture, etc. Such game activities are very useful for developing fine motor skills of children's hands.
- Crafts for decorating the interior on holidays. The easiest option is New Year's toys. It should be borne in mind that paper dolls should not decorate a real Christmas tree (for fire safety purposes). But for artificial beauties such home-made creations are quite suitable.
- Creating a home puppet theater. In addition to making flat and three-dimensional paper prototypes of heroes, finger-type technique is very popular and widespread. For this, crafts are made in a small size, taking into account their future attachment to the upper phalanges of the fingers. Such voluminous paper dolls allow you to organize unusual and useful activities for your baby at home.
Making a paper doll with clothes
Surely, the child will do this work with great pleasure directly by himself or with you, receiving the necessary and useful advice. There are many different ready-made templates for sale. It is only necessary to cut and sometimes decorate paper toys. Is it possible and how to make a doll out of paper with your own hands? To do this, prepare a thick white cardboard for the character, and thinner material of different colors for clothes. Draw the outline of the future doll, shape the face, hair, “dress” it in underwear, and then cut it out. To create various wardrobe items, you must first circle the borders of a paper toy, and then adjust, for example, the width of the sleeve and the length of the dress, etc., depending on the desired model of clothing. Do not forget to provide valves for future fixing on the doll in several places (provided that the contour lines coincide exactly). Usually they are done in the shoulder area and in the waist area.
How to make a paper doll for decorating a Christmas tree?
Such crafts can be made with your own hands very simply and quickly. We will analyze one of the simplest options. Particularly beautiful are dolls made of corrugated material.
- Start from the top, namely from the head. To do this, use a small round blank from improvised material. You can also easily do it yourself. Inflate the balloon to a small size and glue it with very small pieces of white paper, giving it the desired shape if necessary. After drying, you can draw a face or skip this stage to create the appearance. Immediately you can fix the hair made of long thin strips.
- The body can be completely different. For example, just fold a piece of paper into several layers, improvising and creating a semblance of a dress. When making the bottom in the form of a curved plane, the need for making legs automatically disappears.
- Hands can be replaced with wide bat-type sleeves.
How to make finger puppets from paper for a home puppet theater: a variant of a flat picture
Characters can be performed in several ways. The easiest way is to use ready-made images of heroes cut out, for example, from juice packaging. Fairy-tale characters from children's magazines will also look colorful. If the resulting workpiece is very thin, stick it on cardboard. Another option would be to search for the desired picture templates on the Internet. It remains only to print and colorize. And, of course, lovers of painting can themselves turn their ideas into reality. Having a rich imagination and creativity, you can easily make with your own hands not only paper dolls for home theater, but also a variety of decorations. The last stage of work is the design of holes for fastening on the hand. It is most convenient to make two of them - for the index and middle fingers. So a flat image easily turns into a three-dimensional image.
The second option is the manufacture of fabulous images
How to make a doll out of paper so that it looks voluminous from all sides? The art of folding origami figures comes to the rescue. Using this technique, you can easily create a whole collection of characters. At the same time, choose such schemes so that the finished craft turns out with a hole at the bottom for the fingers. If it is difficult to master the art of origami, you can make paper dolls on patterns, fantasizing and adding new details. At the same time, one of the possible options for fastening on the arm is to make the legs of the heroes in the form of hollow cylinders.
As you can see, the limit of fantasy and skill does not exist. Try, dare - and you will succeed!