Project Sheet

Make Your Own Bouquet of Photo Flowers

Funky frames that you design

Difficulty Level: Beginner
Completion Time: 1 hour

photo-main Flowers are a beautiful, traditional gift for special people in your life, but they have one major drawback: Flowers wilt and die after only a few days. With a little creativity and a few name-brand art supplies, though, anyone can create a bouquet that Mom, Grandma, or Honey will be a able to enjoy for years! Photo flowers are a great way to inject a bit of life and love into your office, living room, kitchen, classroom, or anyplace else that could benefit from bright colors and big smiles.

What you'll need

To begin creating our photo bouquet, we'll need to gather a few supplies first:

Getting started

photo-start-1 First, we'll need to cut out some flower shapes to use as templates. Accomplished artists can draw their own shapes and cut them out of regular copier paper. If flowers aren't your specialty or if you don't have much time, MisterArt.com has included our own set of three flower templates (Template 1, Template 2) for you to download! This demonstration produced three flowers, but with these materials you can create as many as you like.

photo-start-2 To complete the flowers, you'll need two different sizes of each shape. Copy machines are great for enlarging or reducing the size of the template, depending on how big you'd like your flowers to be. Once you have the sizes you like, cut out each shape from the copier paper.

As you can see in the photo above, we used a copier to enlarge the original template 140 percent to get the larger shape.

Retracing our steps

photo-tracing-1 Once our white template flowers have been cut out, it's time to trace the shapes on to our craft paper. Trace the smaller shapes on to the blank side of the velour paper. Trace the larger flowers on the blank side of the origami paper. Then cut the flowers out using scissors or a craft knife.

photo-tracing-2 The flowers will look best if we match complimentary colors in the velour paper to the origami paper as shown above.

Adhere here

photo-adhere After the flower shapes are complete, it's time to glue the velour paper petals and the origami paper petals together. Use the glue stick to apply a nice even coat of adhesive on the blank side of the velour flower and then align it on top of the origami paper flower.

Picture that

photo-picture When the glue has dried and the flowers are done, it's time to cut out our photos. Choose one photograph for each flower and draw or trace a circle around one figure in each photo. If you draw the circle on the back of the photo, the line will be easier to see and cut. In our project, we traced around a small mint container.

Once your now-circular photo has been cut out, glue it to the center of a flower.

Going green

photo-green With the photos glued down, it's time to give our flowers a little greenery. First, cut a few leaf shapes out of green velour paper. Tape the leaves to a green chenille stem, then use more tape to attach the stem to the back of the flower.

Bottled up

photo-bottle With your photo bouquet complete, place the flowers in an attractive bottle or vase to display them properly. Be sure to put your artwork someplace with a lot of sunshine so that your love and creativity can shine together!