A Cardboard Whale Shark

I decided to make a whale shark made out of paper mache, my reasoning for doing so is that I find aquatic animals very interesting. Whale sharks and orcas are my favorite aquatic animals along with jellyfish. I did this project for fun and I think this will be the start of a new hobby.

You need cardboard, paint (black, white, blue, and brown), a whale shark reference photo, a hot glue gun, hot glue sticks, printer paper, lined paper, Mod Podge, scissors, a pencil, and some painter's tape.

Once you’ve gathered all of your materials you must trace out your reference photo onto your cardboard. You can do this two ways, you can draw and cut out different sections of the whale shark or you can just draw and cut out your entire whale shark sketch.

 Now with your cut-out whale shark (or whale shark pieces), you are going to trace the cut-out you have so that you have a duplicate of it. You now can either measure or eyeball the amount of cardboard you’ll need to go in between the two pieces. If you're confused look at the image below. And if you have multiple cut-out pieces then you’ll need a joint cardboard piece for each pair of those pieces(The example isn't how the whale shark body cut-out should look).

 Now you should take the body and the “joint” cardboard parts and hot glue them all together. Once it’s all hot glued together then you need to take the painter’s tape and cover the model completely.

 Then put some Mod Podge into a cup with some water and mix that together. You need to apply the Mod Podge to the model, you can spread it on with a paintbrush and then do your first paper layer with the printer paper.

 You can also duck the paper in the solution and then lay it on the model either way you need to make sure the paper is smooth and doesn’t have any crinkles or air bubbles. Wait for this model to dry then repeat the same exact process with the lined paper. Now with your dry model, you need to mix blue and black paint together until you get a shade close to this.

 After the first coat of paint dries you are going to want to mix blue and brown together now. Your blue and brown should look like the example above. It kinda looks like the color of wet mud.

Once that coat of brown dries (it’ll look kind of brownish gray). Now you can start on the final steps of the whale shark, take your white paint like shown above, and apply white dots in any fashion you desire. (Sadly I do not have an example of how the dry coat of brown looks, I apologize.)

   You can do white splatter paint or hand-painted dots. It’s your choice, have fun with this. After you’re satisfied with your dots, you can use the mod podge to give your sculpture a glossy finish. Your whale shark should look something like what’s shown down below but it doesn’t have to look the exact same.