Giant Ant With Salt Dough

When people want to describe how tiny something is, they would usually say "As small as an ant", but that is not the case in this instructable, because I will show you how to make a giant ant using salt dough.

To make the salt dough you will need:

• 80 grams of flour.
• 40 grams of salt.
• 50 grams of water.

For the armature:

• 5 pipe cleaners.
• Aluminum foil.

Final touches using:

• A piece of a tree branch.
• Conifer cone.
• Watercolors.

To make the salt dough follow these simple steps:

• Mix salt and flour in a bowl.
• Add water and stir with a fork.
• Knead the mix with your hands until it becomes a consistent dough.
• Cover it and put it aside.

To make the armature:

• Fold one pipe cleaner around another to make the ant antennae.
• Look at a photo of an ant and try to place and twist ant legs around the middle pipe cleaner with similar spacings as the photo.

Now it is time to cover the head and the thorax of the ant with foil until it looks similar but smaller than the ant parts.

Keep on covering the body parts and add more foil for the abdomen.

Cover the aluminum foil with dough and even the surface out gently with your fingers.

Put 2 round small doughs on the eyes place.

Wrap the ant legs with straps of aluminum foil and when done you can smooth the surface with your wet finger.

• Place the conifer cone and the branch side by side.
• Place the ant over them.
• Pinch the tip of the head to sculpt the ant mouth.

Because I don't have a paintbrush I used a pipe cleaner to color the ant with brown watercolor for the body and black for the eyes.

Now it is time to leave the ant sculpture out to dry at room temperature in order to harden, this might take up to 3 days.

And here we have a gi(ant)^2! and thankfully it doesn't bite.