Art for Kids: How to Make a Dynamic Figure From Card

Video Transcript

"Hello. In this clip we're making a dynamic figure from strips of card. For this you will need some strips of fairly strong black card and a stapler. A piece of white card as well for a mount if you want. What we need is some strips of fairly strong black card. It could be clipped from cereal packets, but if you can get plain black card it's more sculptural at the end. So you wrap it round and we will need a good stapler just to staple the shapes together. So that one can be the body. We need another one for the head, slightly smaller so you can overlap it a little bit more as you put the two pieces together. Overlap them a little bit more. We need another for the arm, and I'm not overlapping them here. I'm putting end to end and stapling. And another arm the same. End to end and stapled. So that's a head, a body, two arms already. Legs. I'm putting two strips of card together. At the foot end, and at the top end I'm putting the two strips of cards together, overlapping them and holding them open. So it's a big teardrop shape, that makes. We want two of those and each of those legs has got two pieces of card in it. Closed at one end and open at the other end. End to end like that. Now then, the fun bit is putting them together, and it's very very easy. So we put the head onto the body and staple the two together. Mind your fingers. We get the arm and staple it onto the shoulder. Both edges together. We get the other arm. Let's have this arm up in the air, doing a pose of a dancer. Staple it together, and now the legs. The curved end of the legs will fit onto the body. So you've got through a few layers here. Make sure your stapler is fully closed and that should hold it. And you can give that a bit of a squeeze to close that curve. And the last leg at the other side. Staple it on, all the way through, and close that other bit. Now, we need a different piece of card. This is going to be the mount. At the end of the leg is the foot, so bend it and staple it onto the mount at one end, and again at the other end. Whoop, falling right over. Just a moment, missus. Hold on tight. And then you can arrange the figure by bending the knees a little bit and making it look much more interesting. We could have one arm going like that. This arm could go here. It could be a belly dancer. It could be an ice skater. It could be somebody who's about to take a ski jump, and together, a couple of these could look like quite a dynamic thing. You can squeeze the body in a bit and shape the head as you want it to, but it's a piece of modern sculpture. It doesn't have all its features like hands and eyes; it doesn't need them. And that's how to make dynamic moving figures that look as if they're going to move anytime."