The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 1

As our company picnic family fun festival is less than a month away, a few people around the office have started wondering if anything will be planned for this picnic, or if we were just going to wing it. Decisions are being made, chores delegated, and consequently I was asked today if I would like to bring a piñata to the festivities, for the kids. They didn't care what kind it was, as long as it was appropriate for a family function.

I said that I would love to.

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Making a life-sized Tyrannosaurus rex head out of cardboard and papier-mâché will be no easy feat.

I sketched some possible designs at first, but they were all too complicated. I couldn't bring myself to leave out any angle, any nuance of the eye ridges or the curve of the jaw. But I was only supposed to be making a piñata, something that people will only see intact for about 10 minutes, after which several blindfolded and disoriented preschoolers with baseball bats will crack it open like a frat-house jack-o-lantern.

At some point (and I'm still not sure where the thought came from), I had the idea to search for a papercraft model of a Tyrannosaurus, and scale the pattern to life-sized. Papercraft modelers are pretty good at simplifying complex shapes, and the work of translating 2-dimensional materials into a sturdy 3-dimensional structure would already be done for me.

After an exhaustive search of the top 10 Google search results, I came across this model by the Paper Museum (site in Japanese). For a roughly 20-polygon model of a Tyrannosaurus head, it looked pretty good to me. I printed off the page with the skull pieces and went to work.

Tyrannosaurus used its shovel-like lower jaw to forage for burrowing animals.

The assembled tiny skull had a few problems. The upper jaw was a little too narrow, and the lower jaw was about four times wider in the front than the upper jaw . . . making for a very pouty T. rex. And the teeth . . . oh, the teeth were ridiculously bad, so much so that I cut them off entirely rather than look at them ever again. I suppose they made it easier to cut (by being simple triangles of varying width and height), but they didn't look good at all.

Jaw problems aside, this head looked pretty good to me. Good enough that I wanted to make a 5-foot-long version of it.

I pulled a rasterized version of the PDF into Photoshop, and tweaked the patterns to correct the jaw and tooth problems. Then I changed the image dimensions in Photoshop so that the length of the skull was 5 feet (the length of the largest Tyrannosaurus skulls), sliced it into 11x17" components, and printed it all out.

Once I'd assembled the pattern from the 11x17" pieces, I tossed it in my car and drove to Lowe's. They sell big cardboard boxes there for under $2 . . . boxes that, when cut apart and laid flat, are about 6 feet by 3 feet. I bought three for the upper jaw, but I'll need more for the lower jaw later.

With the help of a few boys from the Youth Group, I managed to cut and assemble the entire upper jaw in just under 2 hours. It's being held together right now by white glue and duct tape, but in a day or two I plan on replacing the duct tape with papier-mâché for a more authentic (and easily breakable) piñata experience.

Edit: I thought I'd be able to transport the finished piñata in the back of my Jimmy, but apparently I was wrong . . . not even the upper jaw will fit back there, even with the seats folded down and the spare tire taken out. This is going to be a big, big piñata.

Edit 2: The two "pattern" images will be the right size if you print them in pieces at 4.926 px/inch. Their original, again, is here.

Edit 3: Sean Swanson would like me to name him as one of my "helpers" on this part. So there was him, and Josh Hayworth, and Zack. Thanks guys.