An Underwater Collage

The Summer holidays are here - YAY!  And if you are having that moment (or ten), just not knowing what to do with the kids, I have a suggestion - An underwater collage.

I will admit, that the little foxes and I did this last year, or the year before that maybe, doesn't time fly?  It was one of the crafts for our Seaside crafty box.

A collage is a way of creating a picture with a group of different materials and techniques.  Or, in our house it means; checking out what bits and pieces of junk mummy has rescued from the recycling because they look "interesting" and put into the craft box to be used at a later date.

  

First we created a watery background with 4 sheets of blue paper taped together.  Onto this we painted our jellyfish.  This is a really easy way to make jelly fish.  Mix some paint with water, paint a few gloopy circles in blue/green/purple paint onto the paper, then with a brush dab more water on and tip your paper so that the paint starts to run, making the jelly fish tentacles.  

Once you are happy with how your jelly fish look you can flick some more paint onto the paper to create bubbles.

Once we'd made our background we populated our underwater world with animals that we created in a variety of ways.  Fish were painted on the back of cereal boxes with patterns in every hue.

We made turtles with egg boxes and more card from the recycling box.

We used the edges of a paper plate to get the ridges just right on our sea horses, and little bits of felt to give him a multicoloured belly.

My favourite has to be our lobster, made from the kids' hands and foot prints.

Our animals were all cut out and glued onto the back-ground along with various strips of coloured paper and felt for seaweed, and some shell illustrations that I had scanned from and old book.  I've uploaded the scans in case you would like to use them in your own art work.  They're here:

           

I have one last Seaside themed crafty box if anyone would like it for the very special price of £12.  It includes shells and fixings to make a shell keyring, full instructions and templates for the collage above and a milk carton boat.  Great for the summer holidays.