DIY Owl Mosaic

Hey, everybody! It’s time for one of those dollar store craft challenges, and this week it’s a doozy. Use school supplies from Dollar Tree to make a craft. So, readers… What can you make using school supplies as craft supplies? I made this awesome owl mosaic using foam counting blocks and poster board (plus some hot glue and spray paint).

As you can see, the bags of the counting blocks were kind of small and the poster board I used was pretty big, so I think I ended up using about 15 bags of the blocks for the mosaic. I know this might seem like a lot, but I think it ended up costing a lot less than “traditional” mosaic materials, plus the foam blocks were a lot easier to cut and manipulate.

List of Supplies:

• 20 bags of counting blocks (I severely mis-counted and only used about 15 of them)
• 1 plain white poster board
• 1 pencil
• 1 ruler
• Scissors
• Assorted colors of spray paint
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks

How To:

1. First and foremost, I drew a grid of squares on the poster board, with each square being slightly bigger than the foam blocks. That way, I could center each block in the middle of the square and have some space between the blocks to create that mosaic look. It also helped a whole lot with planning out how many blocks needed to be painted, and ensured that my project didn’t turn out looking like a drunken sailor made it. I highly recommend a grid.

2. Next, I drew out the owl design and configured how many blocks I would need to spray paint each color. I can not emphasize how important it is to count and then re-count, otherwise you might end up like a certain someone with an almost finished owl minus eight painted blocks. I also cut all the blocks that fell on curved lines (if that makes sense) prior to spray painting them so that all the sides would be fully painted.

3. Spray painting the blocks. Sigh. This was probably the most time-consuming, frustrating, messy part of the project, but I really don’t know how I could have done it differently. The blocks are foam, so they didn’t really take to acrylic paint very well (which is what I used for the white blocks). So I used spray paint for the yellow, light purple, and dark purple blocks (the blue and green blocks are unpainted). I definitely used up a lot of spray paint trying to get every side of each block covered, and there are a few coats on the top side.

I think if I did it again, I might try to take the time and just spray each block individually instead of going for the mass chaos approach of spraying them all inside a box, shaking the blocks around, re-spraying, shaking the blocks around some more, re-spraying, etc.

4. Last but not least, I glued on the blocks using a hot glue gun. This was actually the most fun part. It took a little longer than I expected, but I did it while I was watching the Olympics, so I had a lot of fun with it!