When Jordan told me he wanted to make an Egyptian Pharaoh head out of paper mache, I was pretty much sure it wasn't going to happen. I made a few alternative suggestions...
"Can you just draw a really cool picture of a pharaoh?"
"That wouldn't be near as cool," he said.
"Can you just dress up as a Pharaoh?"
"That would be really dorky."
"Do you even know how to paper mache?"
"No, but we can Google it."
Of course we can Google it. Google knows everything. But can Google come into my kitchen and actually MAKE the project? I think not.
Really, who am I to squelch the academic and artistic desires of a sixth grader. Know what we did? We totally made an Egyptian Pharaoh head out of paper mache.
And now I will tell you how we did it.
The first thing we had to figure out was what we were actually going to paper mache in the first place. We needed the frame, the skeleton if you will, of our pharaoh.
This is what we came up with: A Styrofoam ball with a Halloween mask secured on with finishing nails, stuck onto a stick, secured into a box, (the bottom of the stick is stuck into another piece of Styrofoam, wedged into the bottom of the box) and stabilized with extra sticks and string. That's also a Styrofoam beard stuck down there on his chin, (the bottom half of a Styrofoam cone available in the craft aisle of Walmart, which is also where we bought the head) also held in place with a small finishing nail. You may not think he looks like much now, but we had to start somewhere, didn't we?
This isn't part of my totally ridiculous tutorial. I just think my boy is cute. And he drew some good pyramids, no?
If I were good at making actual useful tutorials that might teach you something, I would have photographed a few more steps... like the cutting out of the poster board headdress. I might even include a link to a template you could use to draw your own headdress. Except, we just sort of freehanded it, and then trimmed until it looked right. Then we started the paper mache. (Josh was totally in charge of this part, and I'm glad, cause um, gross. It's pretty messy stuff.) Since we are not experts and were on our maiden paper mache voyage, I think our pharaoh turned out a bit wrinkly. We decided we were making an old pharaoh, which made the wrinkles totally appropriate. Really, we were just excited that our plan was working.
After he dried over night, it was time to give Pharaoh a face. Jordan was pretty determined to do it himself. Josh and I offered minimal assistance, and Sam picked up a paint brush and pretended to help for the picture below. We used acrylic paint which worked really well. Oh, and those spiky things coming out of his head? Those are nails we had to stick in to keep the poster board from collapsing under the weight of the paper mache. In hindsight, we probably could have used paper mache for the head and face, and then added the headdress later, since it was already white. Make sense? (You know, for when you decide to build your own pharaoh.)
It only freaked me out a little when I walked into my kitchen in the middle of the night for a drink of water and saw a head staring at me from the corner.
All in all, it was well worth the effort to help Jordan complete the project just as he wanted. He was so proud, and so excited to turn it in. It was fun to see him get creative about the "how" of what we were doing. And also, it made him happy. Which makes me happy.
