She's Crafty

"Hooray For Fish" Mural

We created this fun mural the other day after reading the book "Hooray for Fish" by Lucy Cousins.

Ok, actually we've read the book a billion times the last several weeks. Love this book! It's a story about going along with Little Fish on a mesmerizing underwater tour of friends spotty and stripy, happy and gripy, hairy and scary, even curly whirly and twisty twirly. We like to take a pause after reading each page and decide which fish was our favorite on the page.


It is fun because the author made imaginary fish reminiscent of things like a butterfly, a leaf, a heart, a star, and a peacock (all pictured below). It's pretty fun letting the kids spot all the fish like that throughout the story.


To make our mural we started by cutting a piece of poster board in half. We wanted to add lots of fish so I chose to use a bigger piece of paper instead of a regular 8.5 x 11.


I've had bubble wrap stored away for months now for this project. We brushed some blue paint onto the bubble wrap.


Then pressed it onto our paper and carefully lifted it off.


After we done filling the entire paper, we had created our water background. This was a lot less time consuming than painting the entire paper blue, and a lot more fun!


Then I had Luke tell me which fish were his favorite in the story and I drew all of them with pencil onto white card stock paper, then outlined them with a permanent black marker. The story has the fish outlined in black so that's why we did it that way. I am not an artist by any means, so I just tried my best to copy the fish. Luke used markers to color the fish like in the story (I did help with some since this was such a time consuming project) and then we cut all the fish out. There were places of the black lines where Luke cut off, so I went back over the edges with a black marker after he was done cutting.


We then glued down some strips of green tissue paper as seaweed onto our water background and glued down all our fish to finish the mural.

Meet some of our fish:











I really recommend this story! We just renewed it this week after having it for 3 weeks because my boys love reading it every night. I'm thinking it is pretty worthy of paying the money to purchase it.


This project took us the entire morning but Luke loved every minute of it (and so did I). So much more fun that doing the housework!!

Happy Crafting!!