How to Make a Native American Shield Part 2
So there’s my sketch, now comes the fun part. Now, we get to start adding color to this. So, I don’t think you need to stick with earthy colors unless you want to but I would certainly limit myself to maybe five or six colors. I think if you start using every color in the rainbow, it can get a little confusing. So what if we go with let’s say two shades of blue, a violet, a black and a white, that’s going to be my color scheme.
So I guess the place to start would be on the border and I think probably a Blue Sharpie will be faster for outlining. So I’m just going to outline over all my white colored pencil shapes. I’ve finished outlining the border. So now, I’m going to go ahead and put in a lighter shade of blue here with the oil pastels. And I think after I finished the border then I’m going to show you how to attach this, how to stretch it over the cardboard. So you might want to warm up your glue gun.
Now, I can go back and do a little touch up work around the edges here, the oil pastels. Try not to get the Sharpies and the oil pastels because the pastels just tend to stick to the tip and then they don’t dry anymore. Now, which I just promised, I’m going to go ahead and show you how you attach this, how you stretch it over the cardboard frame.
Now, the trick is to line up ahead of time the exact edge where you drew over the cardboard. And you want to hold it in place because all you’re going to do here is just put down a drop of glue and hold this paper like that. And I’m going to double check and make certain that I don’t have half my design going off over the edge of the cardboard. And then I’m going to make sure that this is like 6 o’clock and 12 o’clock. Now, I’m going to do on it 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock and squirt some glue there and just press that one in place because all you want to do is just kind of you want to get the design centered.
Then, once you’re pretty sure you’ve got it, you’re going to start it in one of these glue places and you’re going to pull, stretch and press it into the hot glue. You squirt some glue down, you pull, stretch, and press it in. You’re always pulling towards the center so you pull and stretch and press it into the hot glue.
But what I’m going to show you is if you don’t do that, what happens to your shield is you just kind of go like this. You’re not pulling and stretching, this is what you end up with. And it just doesn’t look like a real neatly and carefully done shield. And it loses that whole idea of the animal skin being stretched over a ring which would have been made up of bent wood. And you just continue the same process all the way around. And there you have it stretched over the round piece of cardboard.
Decorating, there are lots of different ways you can decorate. You can get big dyed the turkey feathers at the craft store. You can string beads on some jute, some twine or you can even use yarn, whatever you have around the house and these are just hot glued to the back. You just hot glue. You always attached things to the back and let them hang down. I shouldn’t say always because there’s actually some jute, really thick version of the jute that has been unraveled, tightened and knot. Some beads have been strung on there and then little knots type and that has been hot glued right to the eagle’s wing here. This one has a piece of coral. You can get a cool piece of driftwood and tie jute around it, hot glue it into your shield if you want. Decorate with some small little feathers.
A fun thing to do is the next time you have chicken for dinner, we’ve taken chicken bones before. After you’re all finished, there’s no meat on them. Put them in a pot with some boiling water and leave them in there for really long time. Just let them boil then turn off the stove and just let the bones sit there. They pour a little bleach in there. It’s going to make the bones look like they’re really, really old and they’ve just been like sitting out in the plains forever and ever And then you just either hot glue those chicken bones on to your shield or tie some jute around them and just suspend them hanging from the shield. And you could also string some beads on some jute.
Tie some turkey feathers, you can’t get eagle feathers. They’re endangered species and it’s definitely against the law to use eagle feathers anywhere. They may look like them but they’re really turkey feathers. They have them in white with black tips on them which would look a little bit more authentic and then of course you can get the dyed feathers with some of those ideas for finishing off your shield, I’m going to get back to work here and finish up my Plains Indian shield here.
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