Papier Maché Holiday Ornaments

Images and text by Amy Christie for Design Mom.

Remember the Man in the Moon garland from a few months back? We loved their simplicity and cheeriness so much that we had to do to a variation for the holidays. The little sculpted faces were too cute to pass up!

 

For our holiday ornaments, we settled on Santa, Mrs. Claus and a pair of elves, but you can decide for yourself who you want to create. Instead of stringing them into a garland like before, we kept the integrity of the ornament ball, leaving the string loop so they could hang individually.

Again, to keep the mess to a minimum, the base of these ornaments are store bought papier maché ornament balls. With a little air-dry clay for facial features and some paint to give it color, these ornaments are much simpler than they appear. Seriously. You can make these.

Just think how darling these would be peeking out from the boughs of the Christmas tree! Or you could made a set as a fun gift. I break it down step-by-step below. Let’s get to making!

Supplies:

-papier maché ornament balls
-air-dry clay
-paint
-paint pens or permanent markers (for fine details)
-felt, optional

This project starts out with sculpting facial features. Noses, cheeks, pointy ears for the elves, facial hair, eye brows and chins. I detailed this process more in the Man in the Moon post but it is all about shapes and smooshing them down to connect them to the ornament surface.

The next step is paint and specifically, layering the paint to get the best results. The first layer was the skin tone followed by the hair colors.

That step was followed by cheeks, lips and eyes. Regarding the eyes, I like to put down white first to make the color I chose for the eyes really pop.

I did go back to Mrs. Claus and amped up her hair by adding clay to her hairline.

To finish, I used a marker to add fine details around the eyes and lips.

To give the Claus’s a more festive look, I added a scalloped circle at the base of Mrs. Claus’s face and a simple felt hat to Santa.

Then hang them on the tree!

P.S. — Like to make things? Find more of our fun projects here.