Homemade Super Heroes

My kids have very active imaginations, and that comes in handy when they play, but they also like to have their imaginings become reality. When they want specific characters for play-time, but they don’t have the characters they want, they come to me. No, not to beg for money to buy toys, but to design the toy for them.

A while back I posted about the “Jack Skellington” Ken doll that my girls had asked me to create for them. But did you know that before there was “Jack”, there were “Super Heroes”?

My girls became interested in super heroes after watching “The Incredibles”. I can’t blame them; that movie is probably my favorite of all of Pixar’s offerings. They had so many Littlest Pet Shop toys, so it was easy to take a few of them and transform them into super heroes. Instead of paint, like I used on Jack, I used Sharpies. For this post, I redesigned some of the original heroes since the old versions I created were suffering from wear-and-tear.

I didn’t just make super heroes though. We all know that heroes need evil-doers to fight so I also included a “bad guy” in the mix. What would the heroes do to keep busy if there weren’t maniacal villains causing trouble? They’d be relegated to saving kittens in trees.

Oh, well, we all need help every once in a while. Even when there aren’t bad guys around we can still find ourselves in a tricky situation.

Take the next scene, for example: a beautiful fish is almost eaten by a mighty shark. It’s not an evil shark, of course, it’s just a hungry carnivore, but Aqua-Mare can’t just sit idly by and watch this fish get masticated, so he uses his mind powers to stay the shark’s appetite.

In this scene starring Busy-Buzzy, he’s shocked as he witnesses an elephant being pushed off a skyscraper by a zebra. Not an evil genius supervillian zebra; just an evil one. It doesn’t take a genius to shove an elephant off a building, just a lot of hard work.

Of course, I couldn’t leave out the true evil genius supervillian, Grizzled Grizzley.

I created the backdrops with construction paper and glue. I thought it’d be a bit more entertaining to have each character featured in a different scene. I tried to capture a bit of a comic book feel without having to draw detailed scenery.

Here are some up close shots of the costume designs….

Parents: if your kids have one thousand toys which they never play with because they’re buried under two thousand other toys, I recommend turning some of the forgotten and unused rabble into “SUPER” cool art projects. Just be sure to ask for your child’s permission first.