Fly Off on Your Own Griffin

Have you ever seen an animal head mount and thought you’d
like to have one, but rather the head of a mythical creature instead, well then this craft is for you. Make the mythical and realistic griffin head mount and woo all your friends with your amazing ability with cardboard.

I used a Harry Potter griffin as a basic guideline

For this craft, you will need

- a pair of card board cutting scissors

- a hot glue gun

- a small sharp Stanley knife

- a long or 30 centimetre ruler

- a pencil or pen

- a steady supply of card board

- a 2m piece of wood that is 3.5cm thick

- a container of assorted paint brushes

- a cup sized container to wash your brushes

- acrylic paints with colours brown, yellow, white and black

- a pallet

- a cloth

Step 1: Cut a piece of cardboard for the head, the size can vary depending on how big you want it to be, but I cut my head 30 cm long and 15cm wide.

Step 2: Take your Stanley knife and start to make the
lines where the face must bend, notice that whichever way you want to bend it, cut on the opposite side, as shown in the photos above.

Step 3: Use your scissors to cut feather-like ends on the back of your current head, bend the head so it looks like a basic eagle. Cut a bigger piece of card board (which will act as the neck) about double the size of your head and join it by a 30cm strip as seen the in photo below.

Step 4: Join the neck together by the two flaps on the sides. Next you must make the beak by measuring a line that is 8cm long and 4.3cm wide and cut a curved beak shape from that, after, stick

the front centimetre of the beak’s tip together. Keep the rest of the beak a centimetre apart and join it on the top. If done correctly it should look like this.

Step 5: Cut a piece of cardboard 5 times the width of the back of the neck and 2 thirds the length of the neck.

Use your Stanley knife to cut at the start and the finish of the third fifth of length, like in the photo.

Step 6: Next take your piece of cardboard and divide its width by 8 (if it is an uneven amount cut it so it is).

After the pieces are cut, cut feather like serrations on one
side, once you have cut them all,

Stick them on the neck like this. Also make sure you keep the off cuts from the feather serrations.

Step 7: Cut two small circles with a radius of 2 cm and stick them

On, just below the eyebrow mark, as shown in this photo.

Step 8: Cut a piece of cardboard that is exactly the same length and width of the front part of the griffin’s neck, next take it and cut it into 21 pieces.

They don’t have to be the same size but you must put the one
with the finest feather features on last and you must stick them on starting from the bottom.

Step 9: Cut 2 right-angled triangles with the long sides being 9.5cm long and the short side being 5cm long.

Take your scissors and cut it round and then sharp for the ears, take the Stanley knife and slice near the top of the main point and then stick them on just behind the cheeks.

Step 10: We can now make the eye lashes. Start by picking out 2 1cm triangles from the off cuts and pressing them flat.

After that take a smaller sharp scissors and cut fine little eye lashes on the triangles.

Step 11: Take your 2m piece of wood and round it off with a file. While you’re rounding it off, put your glue gun on to heat.

Cut your 2m piece of wood into a 1.5m piece of wood, next
position your head on the wooden pole you’ve made, mark it with a pencil and stick the head on.

Step 12: Now it is time to paint it.

When you paint make a little set up so can find everything like so.

Step 13: Take your pallet and put a drop off black on it.

Use this black to paint the pupils in your griffin’s eyes.

Step 14: Mix yellow, white and brown together to make a mustard colour for the eye.

When you believe the colour is right apply it to the outer parts of the eyes. Once you are done, take the tip of your brush, dip it in white and put tiny spots in the pupil to indicate light reflection.

Step 14: Now paint the front half of the beak completely black; what is left on the brush can be smeared on the other half of the beak.

Go over the back half
with a touch of white, if you want you could put a white patch on the front of the top of the beak to give an effect or you could leave it plain black.

Step 15: Now it’s starting to get getting tricky.

Use this picture as your guide so you don’t make a mistake. So now take the white and paint a small piece just before the start of the beak. Next mix a grey colour and paint up the snout until there only about a quarter of snout left. Once you are done make small feather like markings on the top of the head and around the eyes as shown above.

Note to self.

These are the main sort of brushes you’ll need.

Step 15: Take the extremely small brush and dip it in black.

Then take it and paint small marks on the grey feathers to indicate grooves in design.

Step 16: Paint several black feathers where it looks like a moustache.

Afterward make grey feathers in-between that, and brown feathers in between that and when you’re done, it should look like moa sake.

Step 17: Paint white stripes between the feathers around the eyes.

Step 18: Take the white and paint fluffy feathers in between
the black stripped feathers on the top of the head.

Step 19: Paint a check erred pattern of black on the sides of the neck.

Step 20: Between the black, paint check erred grey and then white.

Step 21: Between the side of the neck and the bottom paint big white feathers. Then paint it in the black stripe pattern.