Upcycled Cardboard Surfboard Tutorial
Surf’s up! In this tutorial, kids ages 2+ can construct their own cardboard surfboard inspired by artist Jackson Pollock! This project utilizes Action Painting and we suggest doing it outside. Here’s what you need:
Brown paper grocery bag (optional)
Piece of large cardboard (we used an amazon box)
Scissors or exacto knife
Tempura or acrylic paint & paint brushes
Hot glue gun or tacky glue
Pipe cleaners
Pony beads
The prep:
Cut the bottom out of the paper bag so that you are left with a long piece of brown paper. Freehand draw a surfboard taking up as much the bag as you can. A trick is to put a dot at the top for the point on the surfboard and then two dots at the bottom for the two corners. Then, connect the lines creating slight curves at from the top and a straight-line at the bottom. Don’t sweat this too much!
Take your large piece of cardboard, trace your paper bag shape and then cut it out. (You can go straight to this step and forget the paper bag if the cardboard is in good shape and you only want to paint one side. We did both the paper bag and cardboard so we could paint the top and bottom of our surf board.)
Making your surf board:
Place the cardboard and paper bag on the ground and paint using any tempura or acrylic painting process you’d like. We suggest doing this outside, especially if you want to use this project to learn about the great abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Jackson Pollock famously moved painting around his canvas using brushes, droppers and other tools, even throwing it on occasion. His quick style of painting has been deemed Action Painting. To learn more about Pollock, we suggest these two resources:
Making the leash
While the surf boards are drying, work on your leash. Attach a few pipe cleaners together and then added a small loop at the end of one. This is to keep the beads on the pipe cleaners and make it easy to glue the leash onto the board. Once the pipe cleaner leash is beaded, add one more pipe cleaner at the end that is a big loop. This goes around your child’s foot when they play with this (Gotta keep that board with you in case of waves!).
Finish it up!
Once the paint is dry, use a glue gun to secure the paper-bag surfboard to the cardboard and the leash to the end using the small loop at the bottom of the board. Now it’s ready to play!
