The Cursive Project: Peacock

For Letter P of The Cursive Project, Trevor chose peacock. Trevor is very familiar with peacocks, as there is a large flock (200+) that lives right around his school. It is not uncommon for them to be blocking the sidewalk as we walk to school, or hanging out on a neighbor's lawn (or their roof). Traffic has to stop frequently because they stand around in the street. They're awesome, as long as you aren't in a hurry or the one who has to clean 200 peacock droppings off your lawn. I never am, so I like them.

My plan for our craft was to start by dipping coffee filters in diluted paint, just like in our Coffee Filter Turkey project. I watered down some turquoise, green, and yellow paints, folded my coffee filter and dipped.  

I explained to Trevor that we'd let the coffee filters dry, then use fingerprints to make the eyes on the feathers. Trevor didn't like that idea. He hates getting dirty. He's done a few cute fingerprint and handprint crafts over the years, thank goodness, but sometimes he is not in the mood to get paint on his hands. He chose to paint his coffee filter instead. Fine by me. 

(Wearing jammies because we did this early in the a.m. to allow lots of drying time.)

I proceeded with the fingerprint step. I started by using my thumb to make dark blue spots all the way around the coffee filter.

I used my ring finger to add yellow dots on top of those. 

Then I used my pinkie to add a dots of green. 

While the paint was drying on the tail feathers, we prepared the other body parts. We used blue cardstock to cut a bowling-pin shaped body, and light brownish grey to make a a triangle beak, and a pair of legs. We also gathered two googly eyes and a blue feather. 

I'm sure I've mentioned before that I store my cardstock scraps by color. It was really easy to pull out a bunch of shades of blues and brown/greys to choose from.

Here is my assembled peacock: 

This is Trevor's: 

What a fun project! I like both the fingerprint version and Trevor's painted version. On to Letter Q!