Pencil Shavings

My mind is racing with ideas on where to begin. Hmm...Well, since it's the beginning of the school year right now, I thought I'd start off with this pencil shaving crafts since we're constantly sharpening pencils and coloring pencils A LOT. I hate to waste the beautiful, vibrant colors and thought I'd put them to good use. I simply googled pencil shavings and came up with tons of crafts that can be done with these. I specifically went for the fish craft since I was teaching them little about these beautiful creatures from craftziners.com which is an awesome website by the way and a great resource. It's a community of many different artists who submit their projects and articles to this website offering a wide range of topics. I wanted to do a simple drawing using a simple technique for my kids since they're young in age. To be honest, I've done this project way back sometime during last spring. My daughters used to love coloring with their new coloring pencils, so I asked them to sharpen them all in one big jar. So we started saving them and ended up with a whole bunch of pencil shavings, then began with our craft. Some pencils may have a glitter wrapper on them which add a really nice touch to these types of crafts. Too bad I don't have a closeup to show off those sparkles. I haven't really tried this, but it just occurred to me that this project can be used as story craft in the book "Rainbow Fish" by Marcus Pfister. So this is what we came up with:

 

All you need is a thick cardstock, crayons or coloring pencils, glue, and ofcourse, colorful pencil shavings. 

 

The first thing we did is, we drew a fish which happened to be done by me. Then the girls colored it in, then simply just glued the pencil shavings on. It's that simple. But since the shavings had a little bit of a curve to them, they had some difficulty doing this so I helped them with the gluing process. That's about it! This technique can be used in many different drawings. Upto this very day we still hold on to those colorful pencil shavings. We may never know when another pencil shavings craft will strike up! Will update when this happens...