Fun Activity for Kids: How to Make Giant Hands

April 5, 2023

Make GIANT Hands

These gargantuan giant hands take a little bit of work to make but they’re so much fun to wear and play with it’s worth the extra effort. Why not team up with one or two others to maximise the fun and minimise the work?

For this fun activity we made pink-coloured giant hands, but you could easily modify this design to create zombie, alien or even enormous silver robot hands!

You will need:

– Corrugated cardboard

– Dinner plate (approximately 24 cm diameter)

– Felt tip pen

– Ruler

– Scissors

– Masking tape

– Newspaper

– Toilet roll tubes

– PVA glue

– Acrylic paint: pink flesh colour, white, yellow ochre, cadmium red, burnt umber, leaf green

TO MAKE THE TEMPLATE

Step 1:

Take a dinner plate, place it on a large sheet of corrugated cardboard and draw around it, this will form the palm on your template.

Step 2:

Use a ruler to draw five lines where the fingers and thumbs will be – use your own hand as a reference for position and proportion. Remember, your little finger and thumb will be shorter than your index, middle and ring fingers.

Step 3:

Add two lines to show where the hand joins the wrist.

Step 4:

Flesh out the fingers by drawing sausage shapes using the lines as their centres. The fingers on our giant hand are 6 cm wide, the thumb is a little bit thicker than the other fingers.

Step 5:

Cut out the hand shape. Use this as a template, draw around and cut out three more identical hand shapes.

Now you have four identical hand shapes, including the template. Two will form the right hand (with the thumb pointing to the left), flip the other two over to form a mirror image, these will form the left hand.

HANDY TIP

It may help to label each hand shape – right palm, right back, left palm, left back – to avoid confusion later on! Each shape will have an inner side (the side that will be hidden from view on the finished product), and an outer side.

TO MAKE THE LEFT HAND

Step 1:

With the two inner sides together, soften the cardboard by bending it back and forth a bit. This will help the finished product look less stiff and more realistic. Bend the cardboard where the joints in the fingers should be.

Step 2:

Separate the two shapes. Draw around your own hand on the inner side of the palm.

Step 3:

Take some screwed up sheets of newspaper and glue them around this smaller hand shape and up the lengths of each finger, this will act as stuffing when you tape the two sides together.

Step 4:

Tape the two layers together with the stuffing in the middle, like the filling in a sandwich, leaving the bottom edge open so that you can slip your hand into the empty space between the layers.

Step 5:

Turn over if necessary so the thumb points to your left. This side is your left palm. Use newspaper to form the pads on your palm and fingers, using your own hand as a reference (as per this pic), tape firmly into place.

Step 6:

Turn hand over so the thumb points to the right, this is the back of your left hand.

Step 7:

Cut elongated semi-circle shapes out of toilet roll tubes to form finger nails, tape into place at the tips of the fingers with masking tape.

Step 8:

Use screwed up sheets of newspaper to form knuckles and the various sections of each finger. We created the appearance of tendons by taping three newspaper twists running down the centre towards the wrist.

Step 9:

Cover the whole thing in papier mâché (using newspaper and PVA glue mixed with a small amount of water), you’ll need about three layers, then leave in a dry place until the whole thing is completely dry

PAINT YOUR HANDS

We covered ours in a layer of pink acrylic paint, then picked out the cuticles on the finger nails in white and the finger joints and knuckles with a mixture of yellow ochre and cadmium red. The hairs on the hand are burnt umber squiggles. We brushed on a mixture of burnt umber and leaf green to add some dirt around and under the giant’s finger nails.

The palm is painted with a layer of pink flesh-coloured acrylic paint, we used the yellow ochre and cadmium red combination to create the appearance of shadows and highlighted the pads in white. Again the dirt is a mixture of green and brown paint, brushed on with a dry-bristle brush.

Make the right hand using the same steps, making sure that the back of the hand has its thumb pointing to the left, otherwise you’ll end up with two left hands – and no one wants that.

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Written by Tessa Pugsley

Make GIANT Hands