Drawing A Swan Head For Making Fruit Centerpieces

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Karen for Expert Village. Now I'm going to show you how to make this beautiful melon swan display. The first thing we're going to do in preparing our melon swans is to choose our fruit. The different shapes of the fruit will give you a different shape swan. A round fruit like this is going to give you a tall swan. A long melon like this you can make a long swan or you could even pick it up and make a very tall swan. You want to think about how you're going to display your fruit. I'm planning on doing a long swan and a tall swan. Later you'll see how I display it. The next you want to do is wash your fruits because the melon can often carry salmonella and things like that. You want to use a very light amount of regular dish soap in a bucket of water and then you just wash your fruit and then rinse it off with fresh water. Our fruit has already been clean. Let's start. If you want you can use a child's marker. Try to find a color that isn't too contrasting if you need to mark out the swan on the fruit. Once you get used to doing these, you can really cut them. Just visualize it on the fruit and do your cutting. I'll show you how to draw it on. The first thing I want to do when I look at the fruit is to figure out where I want the neck. The neck wants to be in a nice high arch. This is going to be the outside of the neck. The neck is going to end with a little curve. Then I'm going to have the inside of the neck like this. This is a water-soluble child's marker so it's non toxic. We should be able to just wipe it right off if it any of it shows in the end. We're going to first make a neck. You want to make a nice curved neck that is narrow up on the top, comes down a little bit wider, and flares out at the end. Then for the head section, you're almost making a heart shape there. You're not going to make the little V here. You're going to end it right at the thing. Just imagine that you're making a heart like this but we're not coming down to a point. We're going to leave that thick there and then make the other side of the heart like that. The next section will scoop around like this and you can have it attach right here. It's almost like a big circle there. That will give strength to the head. If we cut this right off here, then our neck can get kind of soft. In the end you'll see how that works."