Activity: Make a Flip Book

Activity

Make a flip book

In a flip animation book, each page has one frame of a short animation. When you pull all the pages back with your thumb and let them flip by quickly, you see the whole animation.

Inspired by some professionally-drawn flip animation books, our kids wanted to try making their own. In case your kids would like to try, I scoured the web for tips:

- The basic technique is to draw a simple figure - say a ball - and change it slightly on each page. You might draw the ball slightly lower on each page so when the pages are flipped, the ball appears to fall down. Flip it backwards, the ball appears to fall up!

- In our experience, a small tablet or Post-it pad works best. One site recommended using the page corners in an old phone book - but there really isn't much room there! Some sites recommend cutting out small squares of paper and stapling them to make a book, but we found that it's really hard to line them up perfectly enough to flip well.

- For small kids, try making each page a crayon rubbing instead of a drawing. Take something like a large paper clip, put it under each page and rub a crayon over it until the shape appears. On the next page, spin it slightly and rub again. It will look like the paper clip spins when you flip the book.

- Draw in dark marker starting from the last page and working up to the first. That way, you can see your previous drawing through the page you are working on. You trace the previous drawing, changing it slightly.

You can find more art activities on BigLearning.com's art pages: http://www.biglearning.com/treasureart.htm .