With fans to create pictures and crafts, cones have long become a frequently used material. But it is one thing to make compositions from whole fruits of spruce and pine, and another to create flat paintings and applications from cones, or rather, from their scales. This is a small material from which you can lay out any figure or character, arrange the background or fold the ornament.
Pine flakes are larger than spruce, so they add volume to any composition. They are even used in the manufacture of roofs of makeshift houses. After all, they are very reminiscent of tiles. You can combine such a fertile natural material with absolutely any other - with leaves and paper details, fabric and seeds of pumpkin, watermelon or sunflower, cereal and cotton wool. Total not to list.
In the article we give several examples of applications from cones made by children of preschool and primary school age, we will consider in more detail how to work with pine and spruce scales, which will be additionally needed to create a picture.
How to prepare material for work?
Before you start cutting the scales from the cones, you need to properly process them. After all, natural material is mainly collected on the ground. To work with them, the cones must first be thoroughly washed under water, clean all the scales with a stiff brush. Then they are put on a cotton napkin or terry towel and dried naturally.
Only when the cones are clean and dry can the individual elements be trimmed. This is most convenient to do with secateurs or nippers. For thin fir cones , sharp scissors are also suitable. The scales are cut to the very trunk. This is a solid branch in the middle. They then throw it away and do not use it in work. Try to ensure that all elements are the same size, without sharp chips. For young children, such a preparatory work can be done by dad, and in the kindergarten, the teacher prepares the material in advance and gives the children already cleaned and cut scales before the lesson on the application of cones.
Christmas tree toy
Every year, children make Christmas crafts, creating toys to decorate the holiday tree. These are lanterns, and painted balls, and figures of animals, and garlands of colored rings. One of the options for the toy can make a star like in the photo below. To do this, cut out a star from a dense corrugated cardboard according to the pattern. In the upper beam, an awl pierces a hole for a thread or a thin rope, on which a toy will be hung on a branch.
Then begins the painstaking work of gluing on a strong glue, for example, “Moment”, pine scales. They begin to make such an application of cones for children around the perimeter of the star, moving gradually towards the central part. If the first row lies on the cardboard, then the next ones are placed so that they partially overlap the previous layers. The star is voluminous.
Flowers for babies
This is a simple and easy application of fir cones. The flakes ate thin and adhere perfectly to the PVA. First, the kids from plasticine roll even large balls of yellow and red. Then they attach to a sheet of paper and flatten them with a finger. It turns out the middle of the flowers. Petals are made of spruce elements. It is necessary for the child to carefully examine the scale and understand which side to stick it on correctly. The sharp edge should look at the color center.
The stalk and leaves are made of thick green acrylic or mohair knitting thread. Such an application of cones and plasticine is voluminous. Using the combined parts for the picture, children begin to understand that crafts can be made from different materials, the main thing is to skillfully place them and realize the idea on a piece of cardboard.
Leaf man
This craft can be entrusted to children of the middle group of kindergarten. Four-year-old children already know well the structure of the human body, understand how to arrange parts on a sheet of paper for a beautiful performance of the application of cones and leaves. In this work, we use a small or half-bumped bump as a nose. The remaining parts are assembled from leaves.
The rounded parts - head and body - are collected from poplar leaves. Elongated parts must be selected for the legs and arms of the figure. To do this, you can look for the leaves of willow, ash, walnut. For eyebrows, pick up small acacia leaves. All parts are glued to PVA glue. It should be thick, not diluted with water, especially for cones.
Peacock
Such an application on the theme of "Autumn" from the cones can be made in the elementary grades for the exhibition. This is a large picture that uses cherry leaves for the trunk, linden for the tail, willow for fine and small details. A head is created from an acacia leaf. Twigs are also useful for making paws, and tail ornaments are made from cone scales.
If you can’t make such holes in the tail for the flakes, then you can glue them directly on the leaves.
Application "Hedgehog" from cones
To work on such a picture, older children are involved - six- or seven-year-olds. The point is not the complexity of the picture, but the duration of the task. A hedgehog is drawn separately on paper, cut out along the contour and glued to a bright, contrasting background, for example, yellow, as in the photo below. Then that part of the animal, which will be covered with flakes of spruce, is smeared with a thick layer of plasticine. Kids will not be able to do such a job, because they still do not have such strength of hands and fingers. The layer should be so thick that the “needles” of the scales stick out upward and do not fall out of the picture.
After the plasticine layer is evenly applied, work with natural material begins. The scales are inserted tightly, next to each other so that the clay is not visible. On top of them you can plant a pair of plasticine apples, pears or mushrooms.
Decorative owl
To make such a decorative decoration on the wall, you must first draw the contours of an owl on cardboard. Then transfer the cut template to either a fiberboard sheet or thin plywood. The basis of the picture is cut out along the contour. As can be seen in the photo, not only pine scales, but also thin twigs, black felt and hemp thin twine were used for the application of cones.
First, a “fringe” is made from thin sticks in a semicircle from below. Further painstaking work with scales, which need to fill the entire space of the base. Parts are glued alternately in layers, starting from the bottom. When the entire surface is filled, it remains only to make the eyes of the bird.
4 circles are cut from a thin sheet of felt. Two large ones will be the basis for the rope, while the small ones act as the upper part of the eyes (pupils). The rope is wound tightly, for convenience, you can use tweezers. The surface of the felt circle is lubricated with PVA glue, and the rope immediately sits on the glue base. A small circle is glued on top of the spiral. In the end, after both eyes are assembled, they are glued to the bumps. For better fastening of parts, you can use wood glue or "Moment". A small screw is screwed into the back wall of the plywood and a rope is tied, for which this work can be hung on a wall or door.
Picture of cropped pine cones
A picture is collected from the bark of a tree, four slightly shortened cones and dry grass. For small parts use plain cardboard. Pine cones are cut in half by nippers, the sharp part with the tip is not used. Owls are made by folding the head and body of two cones, turned round side out. It is convenient to stick on them small parts - eyes, ears, beak.
From below, several bundles of dry grass are glued to the frame from the bark. So the picture looks more picturesque. Such an autumn application of cones can be performed by a student at a fair or any competition of crafts at school, which are usually organized in the fall, at the beginning of the school year.
House of pumpkins and cones
Such a wonderful composition, which looks like a frame from a professional cartoon, is actually not difficult to do. To do this, you need to cut a lot of pine scales and buy a long pumpkin with a sharp tail. You can not cut it, so the house of forest inhabitants or fairy gnomes will look more spectacular.
So that the roof of the house has a larger diameter, you can buy two pumpkins of different sizes. From the smaller one, cut out the house itself, and from the larger one, make the roof. Before starting the assembly of the structure, the pumpkin must be thoroughly cleaned of pulp. To do this, use a sharp knife to cut off the sharp top from a small pumpkin and in the resulting bowl, clean the flesh with a spoon or knife. In a large pumpkin, the part that will be the top is cut off, and the inside is also thoroughly cleaned.
Windows are cut out in the round part. For the door, the contours of the door and decorative elements are cut with a sharp metal cutter. For this, a thin layer of the peel is removed, they do not reach the inner soft part. You need to act carefully. On the roof (on a larger cone of pumpkin) you can also cut a window in the same way.
All details are painted with paints. You can take oil paints. Pumpkin is smooth, so that the oil will lie on the surface well. If the student makes the crafts, then you can paint with thick gouache with minimal addition of water.
In the end, when everything is dry, you can begin to cover the roof with "tiles", namely, scales of pine cones. To make the work bright, all the pieces assembled together can be coated with acrylic varnish.
Such wonderful natural material, like cones and scales from them, can be used in any idea, to realize your most fantastic ideas on cardboard. So do it yourself or use our tips. You will definitely get the joy of the work done and beautiful pictures. Good luck