Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Moving Pictures Tutorial

See my blog post about moving pictures here: Moving Pictures & Storytelling

Moving picture pages are quite easy to make.

Begin by painting a background scene with watercolors.

Next, draw or paint a small image to be the characters of your story. I, having absolutely no artistic ability, copied pictues of characters from books and cut out animal pictures from magazines and glued them onto thick watercolor paper. Glue or tape your image on to popsicle sticks, which are sold at craft stores. For people, we simply drew a face on the stick so it coud be anyone - mama, baby, daddy, gnome, king, etc.


After your watercolor background has dried, use an exacto knife to cut a slit long enough to provide space for movement for your characters. You can cut curved lines for animals coming down a mountain or a diagnal line for a bird flying in the sky.

After you slide in the popsicle stick, you can glue a wide piece of paper onto the popsicle stick just under where it meets the slit to make it so the character cannot be pulled out. I did not do this to ours as we want ours to move around to other places on the page.

If you want additional movement in your picture, paint a blue circle, divide it ino quarters and on each quarter, paint a sun, full moon, clouds, sliver of a moon. Using an exacto knife, cut a 1/4 circle window in the sky. Attach the circle near the window using a brad. Now your little one can turn the circle to make the scene day or night, sunny or cloudy.


Now you have a venue to encourage imaginative play. Who knows what adventures will be told?