Easy and Affordable Art Fun Making Your Own Animal Puppet!

Making an animal puppet is a fun and easy art project for the classroom, home, homeschool group, camp, or just to pass the time away! All you need are some easy-to-find art materials from around your house and a little bit of imagination!

What you will need to make an Art Animal Puppet

Before you buy any art materials, look around your house for any ready-made art supplies. Old socks and paper lunch bags make excellent bodies for your animal puppet. Eyes can be easily made with buttons, stickers, or drawn on with crayons or art markers. Use scrap pieces of yarn, lace, string, or fabric to make fun puppet hair.

You will need art craft glue, sewing materials (if you opt to use a sock for your animal puppet), markers and other coloring supplies, hair materials (like yarn or string), extra fabric for clothing and accessories, and any other fun art materials you may want to add, like bells, fake jewelry, stick-on gems, googly eyes, and other interesting miscellaneous art items.

If you are making the art animal puppet project with a large group of children, you will probably want to use paper lunch bags instead of socks. Using socks to make the animal puppet requires sewing skills and some one-on-one attention. For large groups, it is much easier to make an animal puppet using a paper bag.

Making the basic Art Animal Puppet

To make the basic animal puppet using a sock, you will need to sew on buttons for the eyes and nose. The mouth is formed with the hand inside the animal puppet. You may want to use art glue to glue a tongue or fake fabric teeth where the mouth is supposed to be. You can use permanent market to color the animal puppet. Yarn and other puppet hair materials can be sewn on or glued with a hot glue gun. Making the animal puppet out of socks requires more one on one attention and may be suitable for older groups or groups with only a few children.

If you opt to use lunch bags to make the animal puppet, then the children can use markers, crayons, and paint to decorate their animal puppet. Use art glue to attach buttons for eyes, yarn for hair, and to create clothing for your animal puppet.

Making a Lion Animal Puppet

Use yellow or orange yarn to create a main around the face of the animal puppet. Attach a tail made of construction paper or yarn, sharp teeth to the gaping mouth, and be sure to include a black lion nose. Black pipe cleaners or black yarn can be used for whiskers.

Making a Fish Animal Puppet

Have the children cut half circles out of bright paper. These will be scales for the fish puppet. Attach the scales all over the fish puppet body. Add fins using colorful paper. For the eyes, you can use a button with a circle sticker in the middle to get an unblinking look.

Making a Bird Animal Puppet

If you have feathers, have the children glue feathers all around the animal puppet body. If you do not have feathers, then you can have the children make their own feathers out of scrap fabric or bright construction paper. Construct a bird puppet beak by cutting two triangles out of yellow or orange construction paper and attaching to the mouth. The children can choose if they would like to add wings to their puppet. For fun, you can encourage them to add a worm in the mouth of the bird animal puppet using a piece of green yarn or cutting the worm out of construction paper.