Fingerprint Sea creatures

Today Tom worked so hard and created his very own little clay sea creatures. We decided that rather than paint them we would use ink and cover them with finger prints, they turned out very well and they are now hung in Tom's room, pride of place.

To make the shapes of the creatures, the day before we wanted to print on them, we used air dry clay. We get our clay from 'Flying Tiger'. This is a shop that sells everything, you can get them all over the world so i'm sure anyone could get hold of this particular clay. The reason we use this clay is that it is the only one that is super soft and this means that Tom is able to roll it and help make the shapes. All of the other clays we have tried have been too stiff and then I have to do it for Tom and then he misses out on the fun. The other thing is that this clay is white so it is super easy to paint over.

We rolled out the clay together using a mini rolling pin. Tom is getting good at using a rolling pin now as we do it so much. We then used the PlayDoh cutters to cut out the sea creatures. This was super easy for Tom to do with the cutters as they had a flat top.

The clay takes around 12 hours to dry so we left it for the day and came back to it today. We used a finger printing set that you can find in places like Waterstones. Using Tom's pointing finger we covered all of the shapes in the ink. I chose to use Tom's pointing finger because he loves waggling this one around at me! The ink went on super easily and Tom seemed to enjoy spreading the ink, even in places he shouldn't!

We threaded some string through a hole we made whilst the clay was wet and now they look lovely hung in Tom's room. This was a very simple activity that anyone could do and we both had a lot of fun!

We also added some eyes onto them once they had dried. This made them look even cuter. Tom loved showing off his creations in a picture for you all to see.