When Wunderboy was two, I asked him what he wanted to be for Halloween… he announced ” A Race Car!” He did not want to be a ‘Race Car Driver’, he actually wanted to dress up as the ‘CAR’. And not just any Race Car, he wanted a replica of his “Shake and Go Lighting McQueen”. So of course I obliged!
Thank goodness for my mother and her AWESOME paper mache skills or I would not have been able to make this little boy’s dream come true!
(Check out her Skills: This is a picture of a 6′ “Shoe” that she made for a float in the ‘Kiddie Kaper’ parade that we had in our town every year)
Anyways, back to the Race Car. We started with a box, some balloons, duct tape, and a whole lot of newspaper! First we had to create the ‘Shape’ that we wanted. We also cut out the bottom of the box and a hole in the top for P2 to stand in.
Once we had the general shape down, we paper mache’d the front to make the body. Once that was done we added the spoiler and the windshield.
The next step was to cover the entire thing in paper mache. We were originally going to leave most of the box the way it was but decided it would be best to have a uniformed surface to paint on. Once covered it had to dry, and dry, and dry….doing this on a rainy day probably wasn’t the best idea either. But, almost 48 hours later it was finally dry and ready to paint.
The first coat of paint was an acrylic paint called ‘ceramicoat’…I tried just using the tempera paint but it did not cover the news paper.
I actually did two coast of the Ceramicoat before adding the ‘Metallic Blue’ Tempera paint. And this time, I let the P’s help 🙂
The next step in the painting process was to add the lighting on the sides, and paint the windshield and windows.
I had to use acrylic paint for this also since the tempera paint just soaked into the blue. Finally, we added the details of the face.
To finish it off we added wheels and straps. I used two different sizes of Styrofoam discs for the wheels that attatched to the car using wooden dowels as the ‘axles’. This was way more work than it was worth and I’m still trying to figure out what type of glue is best to keep them on.
Black grossgrain ribbon for the straps (to look like a seat belt) and my little Race Car is ready to Trick or Treat!
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