Pinata Boy! -- Make a Rainbow Zebra Pinata

How to make a Rainbow Zebra Piñata

Any time I'm going to make a piñata, I always start with an image of some kind. In this case, I used a clip art zebra picture. The two punch balls would be the shoulders and haunch of the zebra, and a connective piece added later would become the belly and back. This would give me three separate candy compartments. Whenever I make a big piñata, I always make multiple candy compartments just in case one of the players lands a lucky swing early on and rips the whole thing open too soon. In a more horizontal piñata like this one, having multiple compartments also helps spread out the weight of the candy.

I'm so cheap I actually thought I could reuse the punch balls. When I tied them off, I tied them around markers so that I could untie them and remove the punch balls intact after the papier-mache had hardened. It didn't work. The punch balls leaked air overnight, the papier-mache collapsed, and I ended up having to start over.

The punch balls were wrapped in newspaper, then covered with multiple layers of papier mache. I connected them by making a newspaper "bridge" between them and layering papier-mache onto that.

The legs were made from long skinny balloons. The hips and shoulder bulges were simply the long balloon doubled back around. I also used some paper towel tubes to help reinforce the legs. The legs gave me all kinds of problems. They would sag to one side or the other while drying, and that angle joint in the back leg turned out to be a major structural weakness in the pinata. I solved the sagging problem by bracing the legs using masking tape and cardboard boxes, and I reinforced the angled joint using cardboard tubes from wrapping paper rolls.

I made the legs too long on purpose because I was afraid of them coming up short. I will cut them to the proper lengths later.

The zebra's neck would be a modified cone shape, but I didn't have any big enough cones to work with. A laminated world map wrapped around a balloon did the trick. I wrapped the cone in newspaper, then papier-mached over it, and then pulled the map out intact afterward. The world was saved!

I don't often use cardboard in my piñatas because it's too tough to break, but the zebra's head would just be for show, and didn't need to be broken open. This photo is my first attempt at a zebra head. After papier-maching it, the snout seemed a little too short, so I stuck another box on the end to lengthen it a little, and papier-mached over that.

All the pieces are assembled! I also added a tail made from rolled up newspaper. The ears are card stock. I have also cut the legs to their proper length and added bumps at the knees and ankles. The hooves are made from disposable drinking cups. This papier-mache zebra sculpture looks a lot slimmer than the final result, because the fluffed crepe paper adds thickness in every dimension. In hindsight, I should have made the hooves a couple inches wider so that they would stand out better after the legs are fluffed.

Before decorating the zebra, I drew stripes to use as a guide. Once I started decorating, however, I realized pretty quickly that conventional zebra stripes won't work on a rainbow zebra because I wanted each color to be separated by black, but using these stripes as a guide, different colors would come together and create awkward mergings. (Some of the stripes are blue and some are black because my black marker ran dry.)

On a piñata this size, the walls of the
piñata have to be thick just to support the piñata's own weight, but that makes the piñata too thick for the kids to break. So before decorating, the walls are weakened by stabbing with scissors or a knife, or by scoring with a razor knife. This picture shows a circled stab wound, but there are about 20 more punctures in the photo. (All those angled black smudges are punctures.) I ended up adding even more holes after this picture was taken.

Decorating always starts at the bottom so that each layer of crepe paper can be laid on top of the one before. I planned out a color scheme for each stripe before I started. In this picture, the piñata is balanced upside down between two small desks.

I added hooks for the two biggest candy compartments. You can also see the door flaps open to two of the compartments. The haunch also has a flap, but it doesn't show in this picture. The hooks were added before decorating began -- if you look closely, you can see them in the two earlier "sculpture" photos.

The mane was made of three strips of cardboard jammed into a slit cut into the zebra's neck and then hot glued in place. I wedged some additional cardboard pieces into the top of the mane to give the mane a wider bristle at the top than at the base.

I painted the nose gray instead of black because I thought that too much black in one place like that would look too "heavy." The hooves were painted silver instead of black because it's a rainbow zebra, and everybody knows that rainbow zebras have silver hooves.

That's all there is to it! Now that you know how, you can make your very own rainbow zebra piñata. This one took a long time because I had to keep feeling my way through the project, and some of the problems (such as with legs sagging or buckling) not only cost me time, but also had me scratching my head for a while. And since I really didn't know how it was all going to work, I did each step sequentially -- first the body, then the legs, then the neck, then the head. Knowing how to do it now, I would do many of those steps concurrently and save a lot of time. If I had it to do all over again (and if the Texas summer cooperated), I could probably do the whole thing in about two weeks. With most of the piñatas I make I really don't know how I'm going to do it when I start, so I go slow, one step at a time, and work out each problem before facing the next one.