Newspaper Snakes: Shaping

Video Transcript

"So now that we have our snake, the general shape, the long piece of snake what we want to do is we want to start making the curves in the head and the tail so what we need to do is we are going to prepare with long pieces of tape, about 6 inches and set them off to the side like we did with the shorter pieces. This is definitely a part where a parent or an adult can help out, this is a little trickier but I would say that probably ages five and up could figure out how to do this on their own. So once we have our long pieces ready to go we are going to choose the end of the newspaper to be the head. I usually like to choose the larger end so we're going to go with this. What we are going to do is we are just going to twist into a shape. Newspaper is pretty easily manipulated so we're just twisting and it is giving us that idea of the head and then what I'm going to do is I'm taking the tape and I'm going to wrap it all the way around that twist and you want to make sure that it goes all the way around the twist to hold the shape so it doesn't come unraveled. So there we have the head and now what I'm going to do is I'll go down and we'll do the tail. We are going to twist again and we could twist this even longer, make the twist the skinny part a little longer so that it gives it more of the tail effect and remember that we are not going to see this tape, we're going to paint over it so it is not a big deal if we use a lot of it, it will hold the shape much better and we can also pinch it down and we will take it all the way to the end and this makes it more like a rattlesnake tail. There we go. So this is our basic snake."