“A Bad Case of Stripes” by David Shannon

Have you read this fun book? It is about a girl who really loves to eat Lima Beans, but since someone told her that was uncool, she decided she needed to stop eating them. One day she woke up in the morning with a bad case of stripes (see the cover of the book). She has no fever or other symptoms other than the stripes so she is sent back to school the next day. Every time someone in her class says some type of pattern her skin changes to it.  After specialists visit her and no one knows how to cure her, an old lady shows up with the cure–to eat Lima Beans. The girl soon discovers she shouldn’t fret over what others think, she should just be happy being herself.

After reading this story I thought it would be so fun for my boys to pictures themselves having a bad case of stripes. I found a picture of them from this past Summer wearing shorts and faded it using the Sketch option in Picnik*. This way the skin became more white and would be easy to color, but it left other coloring in the picture. My boys got out their colored pencils and colored themselves a good case of the stripes. It was so much fun!

(*As I’m sure you already know, Picnik no longer exists! I think if you print out a picture from your home printer without fading the colors, it should work ok with this project. Just make sure to print it on regular computer paper, so you can color it with colored pencils like we did. If the skin color is too dark and isn’t showing the colored pencils you can always adjust the Saturation levels of your picture in Picmonkey.com to try to fade it some. That is my suggestion.)
My older son’s Picture

 

My younger son’s picture

I told my son to make sure to color lightly on the picture but he loves to color dark so there was no stopping him. They are both so pleased with their pictures and they got such a kick out of getting to color each other with the stripes and not only themselves.

Happy Crafting!!

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