I have to make a piñata of my boss’ head for cinco de mayo and I was wondering if you had any suggestions or tips? It also needs to include a baseball cap. What materials and methods do you suggest for this?
Answer from Piñata Boy
There are different approaches you can take depending on how big you want the piñata to be, what tone you’re going for, and how visually distinct your boss’s features are. You can make a head out of an ordinary 12″ party balloon, and make make some shoulders out of smaller balloons or out of thin cardboard. Once the papier-mâché on the balloon is dry, you can cut and shape it to give it more of a head shape and less of a balloon shape — or just leave it in its balloon shape and go for a more cartoonish rendition of your boss. Features like the nose and ears can be added made from something like cardboard or card stock.
You can make the baseball cap part of the head by simply attaching a baseball cap brim to the head in the appropriate place and then decorating the top of the head like a baseball cap, or you can make a separate baseball cap to fit onto the top of the piñata. One way to make a baseball hat is by covering a balloon with papier-mâché and when it’s dry, cutting it to get the bowl of the cap. A brim can be made from poster board or thin cardboard and attached to the cap. When we made the Lil Wayne piñata with the baseball cap, the piñata itself was too big for us to use a balloon to make the cap, so we rolled a large sheet of thin cardboard into a tube, cut snips going down the length of the tube, and then folded the snips in to form the round top of the cap.
Which materials you choose for decorating depend on the tone you’re going for and what your boss looks like. Sometimes yarn makes good hair, but sometimes you might want to use crepe paper or some other material instead. It can be difficult to find crepe paper in flesh tones, so you might want to look for tissue paper instead, since it is available in more colors. Or you can paint the piñata, but in that case I always recommend giving it a base coat of stain-blocking primer like Killz or Zinsser Bulls Eye 1-2-3, otherwise the writing on the newsprint in the papier-mâché can just keep bleeding through the layers of paint.
Good luck!