Walk Like An Egyptian Costumes

I just finished up week 4 of Egyptian Art with my after school kiddos. We created some great projects during our time together, and this was the final project: 3D funerary masks that you can wear as a costume.

The idea for making these came from the book, "The Ancient Egypt Pack: A Three-Dimensional Celebration of Egyptian Mythology, Culture, Art, Life and the Afterlife," by Christos Kondeatis & Sara Maitland. I picked this little gem up at a used bookstore for a couple of bucks and it was just perfect for my Egyptian Art class because it has all sorts of little pop ups and fold-outs that echoed the projects we were doing in class. One of the pieces that comes with the book is a 3D model of the famous gold Tutankhamun funeral mask that you can put together. My copy of the book did not come with the directions on how to put the mask's 25 pieces together, but I thought the children would love to create their own 3D models of the masks. Then, as I was doing research for my class, I saw a few sites that offered printable and wearable versions of King Tut's headdress, mask and the necklace/chest plate.

With a bit of downloading and printing, I was able to provide the children with printables they could color in their down time. I printed the pieces at home on white card stock and had the children use watercolors to add color to the pieces. For the gold, I had them use metallic gold acrylic. Colored pencils would also work, but would be super-tedious I think. During our last class, we assembled the pieces into wearables and they had fun posing in their unique creations.

This project could be done in many ways, if you have a bit more time or you wanted the children to have more creative input besides just coloring, you could make templates using the outlines of these pieces and have the children add their own details. The children had fun wearing the masks, as you can see below...I think it was a neat project to do and I will probably do it again (or some variation) next year.

Here are the sites you can find the printable elements of the Egyptian costumes. Thank you so much for the creators of these pieces! Give them some love and use their pieces in the way they intended (for free use with the kids in your life!). Enjoy!

Printable King Tut Headdress
First Palette has a great printable headdress. You can either print out version to color or one that it already colored and ready-to-go. They also have lots of other great Egyptian projects (along with lots of other great project ideas).

Printable Mask and Necklace
Alpha Mom has an adorable mask (complete with beard) along with a very elaborate-looking necklace. These projects are easy to print out and assemble. Very cool!