Every boy knows how to draw a few animals, at least free hand. If he is clever enough to be able to do this just by watching the horses out in the street, or the tiger in the Zoo, or the kitten who sits in front of the nursery fire, washing her face, so much the better. He will not need any patterns. The child who finds difficulty in sketching an animal free hand will have to trace his patterns from a book, or a toy animal. Often one of the nursery toy animals may be laid flat on the cardboard and its outline drawn and cut. Noah’s Ark animals, if they are large, make excellent patterns for a child to copy. If one has no toys of the right size, the tracing paper may be laid over the picture of an animal in a farm picture book, or a book that tells about the jungle, or a book on Natural History. When the outline of the animal has been neatly traced on the tracing cloth, it should be transferred to the cardboard from which the animal is to be made. When a child has obtained a clear outline in this way, he may next proceed to make the animals alive.

First, he must decide just the location of the animal’s joints. Where are the tiger’s paws fastened to his legs? Where are the grasshopper’s knees? Where, hidden underneath his shell are the turtle’s funny little flat feet attached to his body? Then, using the pattern which has just been made, a new pattern of the creature’s body is made, then a pattern of a leg, a tail, an ear, and these sections are all cut from the cardboard, separately, with scissors or the sharp jack-knife. In cutting out legs and paws, they should be made always a little longer than the original pattern to allow for the joint by which they are fastened to the body. As soon as all the parts of an animal have been cut from the cardboard, they should be laid in place and holes punched with a coarse needle or an awl at the joints. If the animal is a huge one, the collar buttons may be slipped in these holes to hold the sections together. In the case of the toy creatures shown in the picture, paper fasteners were used. When these joints have been made the toys will stand or sit, cock their ears or wag their tails, leap or run—in fact they will do anything a boy wishes.

The paints come next. It will be great fun to make the toy animals just the right color. A tiger may be such a gorgeous yellow with bright green eyes and black stripes. The grasshopper may be either green or a warm brown, and the turtle’s house which he must always carry around on his back should be painted gray.

These jointed animals may be persuaded to act out the children’s favorite stories and will furnish a new kind of fun for rainy afternoons in the house.