The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 15

Cory "I Wear Nothing But Kelly Green Shirts" Folkert gave a sermon today, in lieu of Pastor Jerry. While he had my attention for nearly all of it (and the time of worship was incredible), I kept to my usual habit of doodling during church.

I knew that today was dark brown day, and that I'd need a good design to go off of. I had the basic idea of dark brown loops that (very) loosely follow the skull fenestrae, but angles were tough to pin down. The third design down was the one I decided I would try to recreate on the finished piñata.

(The scale patterns were something I was planning on doing with a Sharpie. I thought I would draw scales all over the piñata, and was experimenting with shapes and patterns. The prohibitive cost of Sharpies was brought up in a conversation after the church service . . . and so to be cheap I have given up my dream of covering the Tyrannosaurus with scales.)

Using the church bulletin as a guide, I taped up 11x17 sheets of white paper along the top of the piñata, and then I just started drawing. Each sheet was then cut up, traced onto dark brown butcher paper (twice). I then taped up the dark brown versions (so that I could continue lining up the edge of the brown paper sections).

For the top, I did almost no measuring . . . just grabbed rectangles of brown paper and glued them on, tearing holes for the ropes as I went.

Once everything was cut out (this was the first time I'd measured and cut everything before starting to glue), I went about the same laborious process as I'd endured with the light brown . . . although the dark brown pieces were generally a little thinner and thus easier to wield than the light brown pieces had been. I intentionally crumpled the dark brown in the hopes of getting the same splotchy pattern . . . with generally positive results.

Having glued down all the brown (and negotiated some last minute re-papering on the back of the head), I washed up and went upstairs to my computer. There, I printed out a new pair of eyes (I intentionally papered over the old eyes so that their circular outline would still be in place for me under the brown paper). The eyes are 3" across, probably a little bit too big, but what do I know? I glued them to white cardstock, then cut them out and attached them to the (so very nearly finished) piñata.

It is a sight to behold:


All that remains is for me to glue the tongue to the lower jaw, and for me to finish painting the gums around the edges of the teeth.

And to fill the whole thing with candy.

And to weep as these weeks of work are ended in only minutes, at the flailing hands of crazed, feral children.

3 working days left.