3 little owls

Owls are pretty awesome, and papier mache is another easy medium for crafting (all you need is old newspapers, flour, water, salt and something to cook your glue with, and maybe tape, paint etc, depending on what you want to make).

The recipe i use for the glue:

I boil 2 dl of water in a pan and I mix 1 dl of flour with 1 dl of water until its lump free, and then slowly add the flour mixture to the hot water. I usually whisk at the same time so that it becomes a relatively smooth paste. I sprinkle in a teaspoon or so of salt (to stop mold) and wait for it to cool (usually my patience runs out and i use it while still quite warm...).
You can make the glue thicker or runnier by for example boiling 3 dl of water instead of 2. The important part is how you mix the flour in to get the consistency right. Sometimes my batches fail because i'm not paying attention, but its only a bit of flour and water, so it's no hassle to start again!

So with this glue you can paste the (ripped, i find, is better than cut, since then the paper edges aren't so prominent on the finished piece) newspaper bits on to whatever you want to make. The glue keeps for at least a few days in the fridge, go with your nose on this one (once it starts smelling, you need to dump in the toilet bowl and flush flush away).

For my owls i just randomly scrunched up newspaper pages into balls, used a bit of tape to shape them and started adding the strips of newspaper dipped in the glue. I let the owl dry after every layer, all in all i did about 4-5 layers: the more layers, the sturdier the surface, but waiting for the layers to dry gets pretty frustrating so i sometimes... don't really wait... but you should!

Then i painted them white so I could start to decide where to draw the features. My little owls looked quite two dimensional, so i cut out some ears and beaks from cardboard and taped them on, then papier mached everything together, so that the white base coat goes on evenly and smoothly.

I then drew the features on again to guide with the painting process, nothing was really planned so they all turned out looking different. You could make them all the same but different sizes, which was my initial plan, but my special owls are just fine too! They still need a protective varnish to make the paint more durable, need to put that on my shopping list... As you can maybe see from the photo below, the psychotic pink one suffered a fall so it's ear took a bit of a hit, have to dab a bit more paint on there...!

My mum requested some for herself, so I made her two larger owls for christmas:

Quite... hypnotic....
Note: do not place facing bed.

Ps: Here's a very funny video of a transforming owl!