Carpet Crocs

These crocodiles are right at home, swimming through the carpet!

You will need:

• Cardboard box card
• Saucer and plate
• Pencil
• Scissors
• Newspaper
• PVA glue
• Paintbrush
• Tissue paper or kitchen roll
• Paint

These crocodiles are right at home, swimming through the carpet! And they're easy to make...

This is a 4 Part Attack! For the first part, round a saucer and a big plate onto a large piece of cardboard box card.

The circles need to be about 15cm apart. Use the circles as a guide to draw the croc's head shape, like this.

Draw a slightly pointy bit behind the middle of the big plate. The bit round the big circle is the head, and the bit round the smaller circle is the snout.

Cut out, to give you the basic head shape.

Next you'll need an oval shaped piece of card for the body. cut it a bit bigger than the head.

For the tail, draw and cut out a sort of long "S" shape. Make it rounded at one end and pointed at the other.

Now you have all the basic parts for your carpet croc. Next you need to fatten it up!

The best way to fatten the croc up is with some newspaper sculpture. So, for part 2, scrunch a large piece of newspaper up into a big fat pillow. Place it into position on the card head.

For the snout end, make a smaller pillow and stick that in place.

Then pad out in between the two.

Next, roll two small newspaper balls for eyes, and put them on top of the head.

Then make two big sausages of newspaper and two slightly smaller ones.

Tape the smaller sausages on, near the end of the snout, for nostrils.

Tape the bigger ones over the eyes for eyelids.

To fatten up the other body parts, use newspaper in exactly the same way. Here's the main bit of the body.

And here's the tail!

The third part involves putting some scaly detail onto the croc. To do this, make lots of small screwed-up bits of newspaper.

Arrange a few of them on top of the head and tape them in place.

On the body, arrange the bits of newspaper in rows and tape them in place.

Do the same thing on the tail and you'll have all the body parts with rows of scales.

For part 4 - making the skin - you need bits of torn-up tissue paper...

...and PVA glue mixed in equal parts with water.

Paint the glue mixture onto the crocodile...

...then lay the pieces of tissue into the glue, and paint more glue over the top.

Cover everything with one layer of tissue and glue. Then leave the pieces to dry so you can paint them.

It's best to give the whole thing a base coat of green paint.

Then you could add some yellow to pick out the raised detail.

Some darker colours are great for shading the nostrils.

Finish off with some yellow eyes with black slits!

Then all you have to do is set your croc free to swim around your carpet or floor.

You could have a go at making other creatures. How about a little turtle?

If you haven't got much card or paper you could always make a baby carpet croc... aww!