Let's Draw
Make Paper Bag Puppets
Special | 22m 45sVideo has Closed Captions
Learn how to make paper bag puppets with everyday art supplies and your imagination.
Puppets take the spotlight as James Schwalbach shows kids how to make their own from paper bags. This hands-on workshop introduces materials, decorating techniques and fun design ideas. Kids in the studio follow along — and viewers can too. Gather your supplies and create colorful characters ready for storytelling and play.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Let's Draw is a local public television program presented by PBS Wisconsin
'Let's Draw' is one of PBS Wisconsin's — known then as WHA-TV — earliest educational children's television programs of the1950s. Originally recorded on 16mm film — part of WHA's 'School...
Let's Draw
Make Paper Bag Puppets
Special | 22m 45sVideo has Closed Captions
Puppets take the spotlight as James Schwalbach shows kids how to make their own from paper bags. This hands-on workshop introduces materials, decorating techniques and fun design ideas. Kids in the studio follow along — and viewers can too. Gather your supplies and create colorful characters ready for storytelling and play.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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The Wisconsin School of the Air presents the Creative Art Program Let's Draw with James Schwalbach, extension specialist in art and design of the Wisconsin College of Agriculture.
Today's program is a craft project on paper bag puppets.
I hear somebody.
Who's there?
Tom O'Vailleya!
Who's there?
Nobody!
Nobody!
Nobody!
Honest!
Well, nobody sure makes a lot of noise.
Oh, I got so funny to go home.
No, I don't want to.
I said you go home.
What?
Tell me why.
Why can't I come?
I got important business.
Cheek!
[Pause] The man go.
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why?
He went that way?
No?
No?
That way?
Oh, I don't know.
What?
Look!
Where?
Where?
You see him?
Where?
Right there in front of us!
What?
I need to get a lot of boys and girls watching us.
I detect them too.
Shhh!
Look!
There's the man!
And he's got a paper bag!
Folging!
They've all got paper bags!
Say!
Say how many people's gone on this pickin' a gun anyway.
What are you silly for?
I know who that is.
That's Mr. Schwalbach and all the let's draw boys and girls.
And I detect what they're going to do.
They're going to make a whole lot more of us.
Us?
Who puppets like us?
Oh, why?
Why?
Why?
Sure!
Sure!
I knew it all the time!
I told you I'm an executive and I sent picnic just to throw you off the trail.
I know it all the time.
Silly but you will be a picnic.
They have a very little fun.
I'm Mr. Schwalbach.
They first hurry up boys.
Come on, let's go!
Hi, Bonnie.
Hi, but hurry up and you can join right in with us here with the boys and girls.
And hello to you boys and girls out there in the classroom.
We're all set, maybe not to go on a picnic, but we're all set to have a picnic of fun or a barrel of fun as Bonnie said.
But we've got our paper bags and our material all set here to make some paper bag puppets.
And talking about materials, let's check with you out there and let's see if everything's all set and ready to go.
How about it?
First of all, you're going to need some paper bags.
And for those who will use either a number four bag or a number five bag, I think a number five bag would be just a little bit better.
To put the designs on the bag, the faces and the dresses and so on, we can use your wax crayons.
They'll work quite well or your watercolors and your brushes and your water along with that.
To paste on ears and hair and buttons and all sorts of things, you'll need scissors and paste.
For that material, you're going to use colored yarn, colored thread, colored rags, cotton, colored paper, almost any sort of material that you can possibly think of can be used in this project.
All right, now we've talked about the materials.
I'd like to say just a little bit about the project we're going to have.
It's going to be lots of fun, particularly if we make our own.
And you could use for ideas for your paper bag puppets, well, you could use most anything.
You could use people you know, people in your own family.
You could use storybook characters from stories you've read.
Or I think most fun of all would be to make some characters, some boys and some girls or some all sorts of characters that you could use for a play of your own.
And we could write the play, make the puppets for the play and produce the play.
If you do that, you may find that the best way, the best place to do that is behind your piano.
You can stand behind the piano and hold these paper bag puppets right up above them.
Now let's get started with these supplies and with our step number one.
For that, we're going to take just an ordinary paper bag.
I have number five bag here and you can see it fits into my hand quite nicely.
The first thing we want to do is open that bag up, stick our hand right down inside of it.
Then let's take, and I'm going to use paint here.
Let's take our paint and mark, measure down with your eye on that bag and make a little mark, oh, just the down a little bit below the middle right in there.
Now that's quite important.
We want to do that below the middle of the bag so that we have plenty of room for the neck and for the head.
And I'm going to draw right around here just to sort of a little neckline and put some curly cues down in there in this manner and oh, some polka dots here and there just to make a little pattern.
Now we can do that on the front of the puppet but we may want to turn this puppet from a little bit to the side as we use it.
So we'll turn our bag just a little bit to the side, continue it over on this side.
Then come around here and continue the design down on that side as well.
So what we have here is a design of a dress for a girl puppet that is in the bottom part of the bag, a little bit less than half.
Now I use paint.
You can use crayons as well.
And Charles down here has been using crayons and let's look what he's doing.
Alright, Charles, let's just hold yours up.
Charles has drawn again a line that's again notice how it comes down to a little bit below the center of the bag.
And he's got, oh, just an intricate design of crayon lines.
He's got a tie on the side and he's going to have to paint on this side yet.
And he's going to do that next with his crayons.
And let's see what Billy's doing over here because he's doing something a little bit different.
In fact, I think Billy's kind of skipping ahead a little bit but there's a reason for that.
Billy's actually doing step two and I'm not going to say much about step two but I want to tell you why he stepped ahead.
Billy here has, has going to take the bottom part of his bag and he's going to use cloth.
He says to make a dress of a girl there for that design.
And so if you're going to do that, you don't want to paint or put any design so you just skip the drawing and tie your bag immediately and going into step two.
So now let's just look up here again and just review this.
We had step one where we can take either the paint and put a design on the puppet here.
We have a bow tie with paint or with crayon.
And then we go over here to step number two.
Now in step number two, we want some paper, stick it up inside the bag, tie it for the neck and then fill out the bag at the bottom.
And we have another one down here.
Now let's just go through that so we're sure that we know what we're doing.
Take our bag, as we have it here, stick our hand down in it, bring it out and then take just an ordinary pad of old paper here and stick it down right down inside here.
This is going to be a little noisy.
So we have the paper filling the inside of the head.
Then take our hand and squeeze that.
Fairly tight.
Now we want to be careful not to get that too tight because later on we're going to have to put our finger up inside this.
So if you kind of run your finger in here, right up inside to get a little bit of a hole for it.
Then we take cord, we can take string or wire or rubber band and just wind it right around here.
And tie it again so that we have the neck firmly tied.
Again, not too tightly because you want to put a finger up inside here.
And the last step is to just kind of fluff out the skirt part of our bottom part so we'll get our hand in easily.
So you have it in that manner and then you can see the head, the neck and the body part quite easily as we have it over here on these puppets here.
And that's step number one and step number two.
Now let's move over here and we're ready then for step number three.
In step number three, we take our puppets.
I've got the head stuffed, the neck tied, the design placed on the body and we make a face for them.
That's done quite simply.
We do it by taking paper and cutting a circle.
Now it can be around circles we have here.
Maybe long and thin or square or oblong or trying any shape we wish.
Taking our paint as I'm going to do here or you can use crann if you wish and put our features into this circle.
We'll start here by putting, oh, some eyebrows up here and we'll put a circle for an eye and we'll have that person looking over there on that part of the corner.
We'll put it kind of a triangular nose and let's make a kind of a happy face if we want to add a little curly cues for the hair we can.
Painting a little face right on the front of this circle.
Now I have one that I painted before because next we have to set this aside and let it dry before we can apply it to the puppet.
Let's take the one that I did before and I'll pick that up.
We have this.
I did this just before we started the program and take our brush with paste on it and paste over the back of this part of the puppet so that we can be sure to stick it on the bag.
Take our bag, come up here and stick it on so it sticks on our good and firmly sticking it right on to the front of the bag and we have our head in place.
Now surely, Anne Ruth have been working on faces and so let's look down and see what they've been doing.
Surely let's start out with yours.
Let's take, let's just hold your bag right up here right next to you and see whether you look better or the puppet looks better then.
Now here she's got one with a good dark hair on there.
Now let you boys and girls out there decide which one looks best.
Then if she wants freckles, she can take one hair of a boy and add freckles up to it and they're painting it on there along thin one here that have glasses on.
Now she's got five or six others here.
But the thing I think is important here and I think you ought to consider this is the fact that Shirley's done four or five of these.
Maybe even more than that and I think that's a good idea.
You might do several faces and then choose, try them all out on your puppet and choose the one you like best.
And she's used paint.
That's one you can think you can do or Ruth over here is used crayon with hers.
Let's try some of hers.
Here's one here, Ruth.
It's a kind of a sleepy eye individual.
That's the way I felt a little bit this morning and see the heavy eyelids and the eyes down there at the bottom part.
Or we can shift here to a freckle face girl.
I think Ruth threw a portrait of herself here.
There's all those freckles all over here.
Fine.
And glasses.
We can have glasses on them here.
She's got on this one here kind of a fat face.
And then if we wanted a long thin face with a big schnazzola on it down the middle we can have one like that.
You can change the appearance of your puppet completely by the kind of face you put on.
It can be long and thin or square or round.
Almost any shape you want.
So make several puppet faces.
Oh, any kind.
Try them all out and see which ones you like best.
And that's step number three.
We've got our puppet now already with the head on.
We're ready to put some hair on.
So let's go on over here to step number four, which is the next one we're going to work on.
We have here step number four, just three possible suggestions for making the puppets.
Here's where you can really have lots of fun because you can just do it almost anywhere you want.
Try anything out and there's no rules at all.
Here's one where we've taken some yarn and kind of made fuzzy curly hair at the top of this kind of angry looking fellow.
Over here we've got a white hair old man with a long face and bright enough he's either got freckles or something on his face.
And that was done by putting lots of white cotton.
And I don't know that you can see it or not, but we've pasted a couple of ears on the side of this one.
Now you can put hats on too.
Down here at the bottom this one here has got a blue hair fastened to the side of this girl with a kind of an angry look on her face.
And then also here we have a cupcake, a little cupcake container at the top that's been sold right in the top to make the head.
There's actually no limit to what you can do on this.
And let's see what Billy here is doing with his and Bernard too.
Alright, but let's hold ears up here so we can see it.
Billy's taken here and he's got a green face on this as a matter of fact.
And on this side he's got, where's that other ear?
Did you look at here it is right here.
And he's going to take another big red ear and stick it right out here on the side.
You can add almost anything.
In fact I could think you could put a couple of paddle pops on here if you wanted to.
And then afterwards he's going to add a big cap on this he told me.
Let's go over here to Bernard and see what he's doing.
Bernard's adding here.
You know I kind of wish I could do that.
It'd be kind of easy.
I'm going to lose my mind.
I just pick up a little bit and paste some more on top here.
And you take here some yarn and just glue it right up here wherever you want it to be.
He's got the hat on already.
And that's one of the simplest ways to do it.
And of course there's many many other ways as well.
Now there's the first four steps.
There's one more thing we should talk about before we go into this puppet.
In order to operate this puppet puppet we've got to get it on our hand somewhere other.
And that's very simple in this manner.
When you hold the puppet you take your thumb and stick it out in this manner and that will be the right arm of the puppet.
Your second finger comes out in that manner for the left arm of the puppet and the first finger comes up and that's the neck of the puppet and goes up into the head.
So that the puppet just fits right on over in this manner with the first finger up into the head.
Now in order for the thumb and the second finger to come out of the puppet we've got the cut little hole.
So we take our scissors and cut right in there and let the thumb stick out and cut over here on the other side and let the second finger stick out.
So we have our puppet.
We can take our first finger and move the head, move it from sideways, move the arms back and forth.
So you may have a little trouble with these bags tearing and if you do that you can see you're maybe able to see I put some tape around the outside of the hole.
Some scotch tape or masking tape right around the outside of the hole will strengthen it and make them hold very well.
So there now we're all set with our puppet.
Let's see a few puppets that these boys and girls have been here today from the Fitchberg Center School have made for us.
Now on our suppose you bring out those puppets.
Alright let's start with this one here.
This one here has copper here.
He's a kind of an ugly looking fellow with a big mouth here and the hair at the top is made by just using a chor boy and pasting it on the top.
Notice how the ears stick out on the side.
Let's have this one here with the headscarf.
And here's a girl puppet with a big headscarf on and she's looking kind of sad looking too.
Freckles on her face and a cloth over the head to make a kind of a cap out of it.
And again the name of her school right on the top.
I think this is the polka dot school in here as we've called it here.
And let's come up with this.
This is a brilliantly colored one.
I wish you could see this in color because there's a yellow face and a red tie and a purple dress there and white hair and a white scarf and purple eyes it brilliantly if it colored an old or looking lady here.
Now this one is a little bit different again and I don't know whether you're going to be able to see this.
What we have here is a little thing for the hat, cotton for the hair.
But here on the nose and on the eyes and I don't know whether you can see that or not but we've taken paper and the girls have just pasted it right out so it sticks out away from the face.
And that's again something you might try.
You could put corks or bottle tops or anything you wish to stick out to make noses and eyes pop right out.
And the first one we want to show you is a black sort of which looking puppet with black hair and a yellow ribbon on the top of her hair and a polka dot orange and dark dress.
Again one that looks like it was all for fun and me.
And so those are our puppets that we've made today.
We're all set on those and we're almost ready to go but before we start and before we review our things let's just think a minute bit about the things I said at the beginning.
And I just suggested that you create your own designs for puppets that you have lots of fun doing it and if possible you might make your own characters and write a play to go along with your puppets and maybe sometime you'd like to produce it.
And I think we're all set now to go through the review and I'm going to ask Butch over there to go through these reviews for how about it butch can you review them for us?
Oh boy boy that was fun was I ever fun what did I tell you Bonnie?
I know you said it would be a picnic Mr. D. Tech wanted was it was it was a picnic of fun.
The fact was bulging you said with things to eat while it was bulging all the supplies from a glass crayons and paste and scissors and bits of colored yarn and cloth.
Good to eat.
Well, you may Mr. D. Tech have I bet you can't remember all the clues.
I mean the clue is to how to make puppets.
I can too.
First step.
Lettuce the paper bag and color or paint and leave a space for your silly all head at the top.
And leave a space for my silly all head at the top.
I'll show you.
Step number two.
Lot of newspaper to stuff the head.
Entire with a string or a wire or a rubber band.
Oh I'll join it.
Then step number three.
Oh, number three.
The best.
Cut out a face to fit the head and color or paint a beautiful nose and eyes and mouth like mine.
Make it funny just like books then then paste the face on the bag and decorate it with the yarn and other stuff.
I make my ears on a wallpaper or a nose it really has shape.
But don't you forget our hands.
They're really important.
You have to make holes fit and to stick through and that's where we're counting on you.
Bye everybody.
Bye and bye.
Next Friday at the same time we'll present another program for schools in the series Young Experimenters.
[Pause] I hear somebody.
Who's there?
Nobody.
Nobody.
Nobody.
Well nobody sure makes lots of noise.
I thought so.
Bunny you go home.
No, no, I don't want to.
I said you go home.
Why?
But tell me why.
Why can't I come?
Because I got important business secret business detective business detective business.
What for?
Don't tell.
Don't tell.
I'm following somebody.
I'm following a secret somebody and I don't want you following me when I'm following somebody's secret.
But where is it, buddy?
It's a secret.
He's a man.
A man?
And he's going on a picnic.
A picnic I love this.
Oh, it's a white.
And he's going to have a good one with a luch.
What's going to eat?
What's going to eat?
What's what?
Everything grudged and lots of it.
But how do you know?
I know.
Because I saw him.
He had a paper bag.
Oh, what a stop.
It wasn't bogey.
Did you smell it?
Smell it.
A good detective doesn't have to smell it.
I saw the bag bogey and I'd eat a picnic.
And now I'm going to follow him and we're going to have a picnic.
The two of us together.
You go home, Bunny.
I will not.
I'm going to.
You follow him and I'm going to follow you.
He'll hear you.
You'll make too much noise.
I do not.
I can be as good a detective as you can but... Well, come on, man.
And then... Shhh.
Which way but...
Which way did a man go?
Why... Why he went that way?
No.
No, that way.
I know.
That way.
Which?
Look.
Where?
Do you see him?
Where?
There.
Right there.
And in front of us.
But I detect a lot of boys and girls watching us.
I detect them too.
Shhh.
Look.
There's the man.
And he's got a paper bag.
Bouging.
They've all got paper bags.
Shhh.
Say how many people's going on this picnic anyway.
When you see a lot of them.
I know who that is.
Yes, Mr. Schwaback.
And all the less job-ising girls.
I detect what they're going to do.
They're going to make a whole lot more of us.
Us?
Puppets like us?
What?
Why sure?
Sure.
I know it all the time.
I told you I'm an detective.
And I said picnic just to throw you off the trail.
I know it all the time.
But he will be a picnic.
They'll have a barrel of fun.
I'm Mr. Schwaback.
We for us.
Yeah, let's go.
Let's go.
Right.
[Puppets]
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Let's Draw is a local public television program presented by PBS Wisconsin
'Let's Draw' is one of PBS Wisconsin's — known then as WHA-TV — earliest educational children's television programs of the1950s. Originally recorded on 16mm film — part of WHA's 'School...