Trace Your Child’s Hand to Create 3D Art
Around this time of year, young children learn to draw their own hand and turn that drawing into a picture of a turkey. But now that Thanksgiving is over, and if they’re still tracking those fingers, there’s another (perhaps cooler) way to turn them into art: draw a hand that looks three-dimensional.
The idea comes from user Kinja MoetaRabona, who posted a link to this tutorial on Youtube in the comments to another Offspring post :
I’m not even remotely artistic, so I watched it and thought, “This is so great, and I bet I couldn’t pull it off.” So, I called my 9-year-old son, ran it over his hand, asked him to bring me some markers and got to work.
I traced his hand with a pencil and began to draw with a marker. You do this by drawing straight lines across the page until you reach your hand; draw an arc across the wrist, arm, and fingers, and then straight across the rest of the page. If you want to frame or gift it, you might want to use a ruler for more precise lines. But if it’s just for your fridge, you can just freehand, like this:
It’s not that much at first. But when you add new lines of different colors below the original lines, the hand starts to lift off the page.
If you have markers of different colors (or flat-edged markers) this will work best. All I had to work with were my son’s Broad Line Crayola markers , which worked great during my test run; but a flat edge will sharpen the lines.
When I added paint, my son periodically came and looked over my shoulder to check my work. When I was halfway done, he gave a little sigh and said, “Wow, that pretends to come off the paper.”
With a ruler, markers and photo frame, this will be a unique and affordable gift for parents and grandparents – their little pens as a keepsake while they are still young.