Have you seen this book?! It's pretty cool. Star Wars finger/thumb print art :)
My husband wanted some wall art for his office at work. At first, I thought I could have the kids make some sort of ships (container ships, sail boats, tug and barge, tanker) out of their handprints. (His work is all about large shipping vessels!)
But, there are not too many ideas out there to do that. Which meant I would have to get pretty creative. And at Christmas-time: creative I am not.
Then I found this book. Or rather, refound it. I had saved it to one of my amazon wish lists, because it's pretty freaking awesome!
Here's what I came up with for the wall art:
It's pretty awesome, right?!
All the characters are made with the kids fingerprints. Isaac is exclusively the Death Star scene and the Rancor. I did the green music men and Princess Leia. Maureen did just about everything else. I, of course, did all the drawing since this was a little beyond what a 4 year old and not yet 2 year can handle.
I found this massive Star Wars Collaboration on DeviantArt by Zimeta (link here).
I cropped and photoshopped the crap out of the background to get rid of all of her characters so that I could add my fingerprint characters. It was a lot of work to digitally edit my two scenes!
I got a 16x20 inch frame from Target for about $30. I'm sure I could have gotten one cheaper if I had waited for a sale, but I got lazy in my Christmas shopping and went for convenience.
Michael's Craft Store custom cut a 16x20 mat into two 15x5.5 inch rectangles to fit my artwork. The mat ended up costing ~$34 and it took longer than the originally quoted 2 days - over a week, but I wasn't ready with the art so it wasn't a big deal.
I was planning on printing the backgrounds on my home printer using 8½x17 paper (that would be 11x17 cut to size) but my printer started leaving streaks and was a complete mess. I thought there was a blockage and tried everything, but nothing worked. Turns out Office Max/Office Depot can print 11x17 color copies for about $1.23 + tax.
I thought I would be all awesome and upgrade to the nice paper. But....the nice paper would NOT hold the fingerprint ink. It never dried and just rubbed away. So I went back to the store and the guy was SUPER helpful. He pulled out all the different paper types in that size available and let me touch them and stamp on them to see what would work.
In the end, I used regular 'ole 20 pound copy paper. The cheap stuff. My inkjet printer ink at home was the best (dried the fastest) and then OfficeMax's cheap paper. Go figure.
I did all this two days before we were leaving for Christmas at the in-laws. I was kind of freaking out.
Thankfully, I was slightly prepared in that I knew the layout I wanted. I had used all my streaky at-home printer copies to lay down characters and figure out sizing and practice stamping with the older child. By the time I got the paper figured out, I was good to go with everything else.
Once the stamping started it was one long day of stamping with the kids and drawing.
I used stencils to do the rancor with the under 2 year old, I used paper to block off the entire image except the rancor and helped him go to town with his finger prints. He had some fun with that!
The Death Star was a little more problematic since the entire background was black and dark grey - what was I thinking?! I ended up using more stencils and white paint for a background. It worked out b/c the stencils made it so much easier for me to work with the younger one and not worry about getting stray ink EVERYWHERE!
I'm really happy with how well it turned out. The Husband seemed to like it too - although he would rather hang it up in the house and not at the office! Oh well, at least I try to decorate his office walls :)
If you got the book and tried out some Star Wars fingerprint art, I'd love to see what you've done!!
Happy Creating!
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