Cardboard Tube Penguin

Here’s a little project that makes a brief appearance in my book ‘Art Shaped’. This penguin is made from just two cardboard toilet roll tubes and one paper straw, if you don’t have a straw you can just make a small thin tube by rolling a regular piece of paper around a pencil/pen and securing it with some tape. You just need a pair of scissors and some masking tape to make the basic shape, then, if you want to strengthen it you can cover it with a thin layer of paper or tissue and then paint it. Alternatively, if you don’t have paints you could just use black and white paper to mache the colours on, maybe ripping black or white colours from old magazine pages.

Here’s the making video . . . you can obviously use extra pieces of tube to make things stronger, I’ve stuck to just the two, and tried to use every piece of them without throwing anything away.

You could try making different species of penguin by tweaking the design or changing the colours. Or maybe take this basic blueprint and experiment with other animals that have a basic cylindrical body-shape. If you increase the size of the original tube (making one yourself by rolling up a piece of thin cardboard) then you can make all sorts of animals like this. Project 18 in my book Art Shaped is called ‘Tube Animals’ and has more ideas and possibilities that you could try.