Paper Bag Bison

As promised, here is the bison project I made. The entire thing is made with a single paper bag. Affiliate links below. 

 

Paper Bag Bison

Materials:

• paper lunch bag
• bison drawing
• scissors
• Folk Art paint
• craft glue

Steps:

Carefully open a paper lunch bag. You should be able to peel it open without cutting it. I'm reusing one I got from the store when I bought bagels. It's wrinkled, but that totally doesn't matter because you'll be adding even more wrinkles!

Use scissors to cut out the bison's body from an edge of the paper bag. Then remove the head from the template and use it to cut an extra head. Cut the remaining portion of the paper bag into two long rectangles. 

Trim the horns and beard off the full-body bison. Crumple and then flatten each piece, as shown below. 

Paint one large rectangle with light blue, then add streaks of white to make the sky. Paint the other rectangle golden. Paint the back half of the bison's body light brown and the front half (including the head) dark brown. Paint the horns white. 

When all the paint is dry, glue the pieces together. 

I'm really happy with my bison project! 

How to Draw a Bison

What do you call this animal?

Source

Most of the time, I call it a buffalo. I'm trying to get into the habit of calling it a bison. The American Bison, while commonly called a buffalo, is not technically a buffalo. 

This is a buffalo. 

Source

The American Bison is the national mammal of the United States, as well as the state animal of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. Bison nearly went extinct in the late 1800's following hunting (and slaughter) by settlers during the Westward Expansion. Fortunately, recovery efforts have brought the wild bison population up to around 31,000 individuals.

I had a bison craft in mind, but I needed to make myself a template first. As I was drawing my bison, I realized I should share the steps I took in the form of a tutorial. As always, I drew in Sharpie for the tutorial so that the photos would show up well. There are several places where you'll need to erase foundation lines, so you should sketch lightly in pencil. 

How to Draw a Bison

Start by drawing the bison's body in the center of the paper. That's its hump on the upper right. 

Add the bison's head. It is positioned slightly lower than the hump and is basically teardrop-shaped. Draw horns and a beard.

Now draw the legs in the foreground. The front leg is quite shaggy, so give it some extra width. 

Draw the other two legs, then add a tail, eyes, and a nose. 

Tomorrow I'll show you what I did with my bison template. 

South Dakota Badlands Painting

This post contains affiliate links. 

After completing the South Dakota Little Passports kit with Trevor, I was inspired to create this:

---------

South Dakota Badlands Painting

Materials:

• Strathmore watercolor paper
• Sakura Koi travel watercolor set
• colored pencils

Steps:

You can make your painting any size, but I chose to cut down my paper to about 6" x 9". That's the size I'd do in a classroom setting so that the paper is small enough to focus on detail.

Begin by brushing water onto the paper with horizontal strokes to lightly moisten the paper (the goal is moist, not wet). I LOVE using the water brush - nothing to spill and perfect water flow every time. Add swipes of blue across the top, browns across the center, and golden tans and hints of greens across the bottom.

The paint should dry very quickly if you haven't used too much water. If the paper is still wet, wait. When it is dry, add horizontal lines of color along the center section, then build up the mountains. Use light browns, golds, rusts, creams, and related shades. You're trying to mimic the sedimentary rock of the Badlands. 

Lightly sketch the shape of a bison (I'm trying to break my bad habit of calling it a buffalo) in the bottom section of the paper. 

Fill it in with brown paint, dark for the body and lighter for the horns. 

Now add a streak of yellow to the sky and shadows to the left sides of the mountains. Create brush in the foreground using golds and greens. When everything is dry, use colored pencils to fix any gaps (I smoothed my mountains a bit) and then add eyes and a nose to the bison.

It looks like a beautiful place to visit. Someday!