I really am excited about showing you how to make these African Dancing Figures. They really are a lot of fun. You’re going to need a couple of things to get started though, you're going to need some wire and some masking tape, some raffia for decoration, some fabric for decoration. A hot glue gun, a glue stick, some paint and a scrap of cardboard would be good and some kind of material or pattern that looks kind of safari-like for our little base that will put them on at the end.

So I'm going to go ahead and get started showing you how to make these. Okay, the wire I actually bought at an art store and it’s the wire that sculptures usually use to create an armature which is the basis for a sculpture that holds the clay or the paper-mache or whatever you’re using as your material. And what I'm going to do is measure out an arms length. Okay, and that is going to be—that’s going to form the head and the body and the legs.

And then we’re going to cut one that’s a bit shorter and the neat thing about this is if we have too much wire we can always cut off the excess. Okay, and then I need a bead. I’m going to pick out a bead for the dancers head. And I want to put it on the longer wire. Try to bead it, aha! Okay.

Now we’re going to go ahead and put the bead like so because this is going to be his head. And then we’re going to take the wire and we’re going to wrap it around his neck a couple of times and then you're going to bring this wire down and back up. And then this wire down and back up okay, and the extra wire we’re just going to wrap around to kind of make a neck or a body. But this right here is actually his head. Okay, and right now I know he looks kind of funny but it will make sense eventually. And then these become his feet. Okay, then we’re going to take the other wire and just below where we made his head this is where we’re going to put the arms as if they we’re shoulders there. Okay and I'm just going to wrap one or two times around.

Okay, and then you bend these back in to make arms and you can make them as long as you want. It’s kind of fun to make them extra long because then you can do some really cool things with the arms and legs and bend them so the really look like they’re dancing. They're fun figures so they don’t have to be realistic it’s not like you're trying to make a sculpture of a human being that’s going to pretty accurately done. Okay, so this is the basis for my little figure and what I'm going to do next is I'm going to take some masking tape and I'm going to start up on his body.

I’m just going to wrap the masking tape around his body over the wires and press them down. And now from here to my left I call her my spirit doll, which is kind of the spirit of cheerleading or she’s just kind of your ra-ra kind of gal. And she’s made the exact same way that this armature is made. We start out the same way with the wire but instead of wrapping with masking tape I wrapped her with fabric. And as we go through making the African Dancing Figure I’ll explain how to make that one, I’ll show how you make the African Dancing Figure but then I’ll explain how we made the spirit doll and how we use different materials.

Now you’re just going to have to wrap the arms, the legs, the body, but you don’t have to wrap the head. If you want right here, if you want to kind of build up the body a little bit you can just that kind of crisscrossing the tape, see I didn’t have too much wire and I’ve already created a bit of a chest there.

But later we’re going to be putting close-on the spirit doll, so you know we can fatten them up a little bit. Okay now I want to make sure that I separate the legs, because we want these guys to have really long legs so you can really pose them in some kind of wild dancing motion.

And I’m just going to go ahead and keep wrapping. And you even want to wrap their feet, well I have to go back and finish wrapping this part. So even the ends of the hands everything gets wrapped.