creating a daruma

I have been sitting on this project for quite a long time. I originally saw the Daruma project on Dick Blick years ago and filed it away for a later date. The Sculpture and Paper spring break camp seemed like the perfect place to use it!

Daruma's are a japanese toy, some say it is a talisman for good luck. But I fell in love with the story surrounding the Daruma. When you first get a Daruma, the eyes are blank then when you make a goal, you color in one eye. The Daruma is then a reminder of the goal you set and only when you complete the goal do you color in the other eye.

If that wasn't great enough, Daruma's wobble around but you can't knock them over. They will always stand upright...a metaphor for no matter how many times you may fall down and fail, keep working and you will be upright and succeed.

Could there be a better message in an art project for kids?!! I think not.

So with easter right around the corner, I picked up some plastic eggs at the craft store. I super glued a heavy nut into the bottom of each egg and then stuffed them with some cotton balls tightly and closed them up.

Now this project should be done with papermache. But I had a time issue and did not think the papermache would have time to dry before the end of the week, so we used masking tape. I'm not sure what the fascination is with kids and rolls of masking tape, but they absolutely love working with it.

Each camper covered their entire egg in tape, exactly the same way they would have with papermache. And then we painted them with acrylic paint.

I showed them some examples of japanese Daruma's but told them they could create anything they wanted for their character.

10 year old

This became the favorite project of the week. Even more popular than the geodes, which I did not think was possible. They loved making them almost as much as they loved playing with them. The quickly became prize possessions.

8 year old

10 year old, owl

6 year old, hawk

I'm going to age myself here, but the Weeble Wobble toy commercial kept running though my head the entire time they played with them, ''weebles wobble but they don't fall down"

Here's my sad attempt at a video of how one works,

More than once I heard how great this project was, how much fun they had creating the daruma. So no doubt this will be a project I won't wait years to try again.