Angry Balls

If you thought those tote bags were awesome, hang on to your hats boys and girls – ’cause you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! May I present the Angry Balls:

Who will feature prominently at the party tomorrow – and they are AWESOME, if I do say so myself. Oh, so very awesome.

To make Angry Balls, draw (or trace) appropriately colored Angry Birds faces onto smooth balls with a dry erase marker. WARNING: Dry erase markers will only wipe off of the balls for a few seconds after you draw with them. After that you can scrape them off by drawing over them with fresh marker (just like when you’re trying to clean it off of a board where it’s been sitting for a week). I didn’t try after a minute or two, but another blogger reported that after about five minutes, not even a Magic Eraser would remove it, so work fast. You want to make sure your lines are only where you want lines, because unless you’re using a heavy primer or putting on ten coats of paint – pssh, who has time for that? – your lines will be faintly visible through all but the black paint.

Now comes the time-consuming part. Starting with the lightest colors first, paint and wait for it to dry. Then paint again. Wait. Paint again. After three coats of paint I decided that was good enough and moved on to the next color.

I think this was in the middle of the second coat, but you get the idea. You can still see where I drew the pupils – which is actually a good thing for painting them on later. Just be aware of where you make your lines.

Oh, a word about paintbrushes! I bought some cheap plastic-bristled brushes to do this with. Big mistake. There were brush marks as far as the eye could see. Since I had already started, I looked around for something else, and I ended up pulling out the brushes from my college art classes – the opposite of cheap, let me assure you – and they worked better but still left some marks that I had to work to even out in the next coats. I think an inexpensive set of foam brushes would probably work best for these.

At any rate, once you have the white and orange (and brown, in the case of the yellow bird) painted on, take a small brush and outline everything in black. This is the part where it transitions from craft project to AWESOME. Going fast helps you avoid wavy lines, but going too fast makes for mistakes, so pick one section at a time and see if you can do it in one stroke. If you look at the ‘belly’ of the yellow bird in front, you can see some nice wobbles where I wasn’t able to go around with one paintbrush-load of paint, but you know what? I’m pretty sure the kids won’t care.

Once more thing: I’m going out later to buy some clear spray protectant to keep the faces from getting scraped off during play. Before that (however much it ends up costing) the balls cost me $2 per yellow ball and $3 for the red one because I had to buy some of the paint colors. Not too bad though, and did I mention? They’re AWESOME.