All You Need Are Your Fingers & A Wall
I was playing with my friend’s 4-year old daughter in her Hong Kong home one day while her mother and my other half watching and laughing at our funny antics. Then, the smart little girl pulled me by my pinky finger towards a bare wall just next to the TV set and asked me to sit down. Her mother seemed to know what she wanted to do, closed the curtains, dim the lights and shone one of the lamp towards the bare wall. Now, let me remind you, she is only 4 years old. She started some shadow puppet show and did almost 5 animal shadows with her cute little fingers. I can barely do 2! Both my girlfriend and myself were so amazed that we asked her to do it a few more times just to “wow” over and over again. And she is delighted to entertain us. Too bad I did not have my camera around.
Then when I got back home, I thought about the hand shadow illusions and started my search on the Internet. This is what I found, and 3 of the animals are similar to what the little girl has done. And I tried all myself:
This pig or wild boar is not easy to do, the top fingers have to bend a little with a bit of hump to form the forehead.
I called this the jumping dog and my girlfriend would laugh non stop when I wiggle the tail and legs by moving my thumb and other finger tips.
Now the little girl actually did the elephant, she even made the trunk goes up and down along with elephant sound (her version of course). My version of elephant is much, much fatter said my other half – Oh darn!
Camel is tough to form but once you got the fingers placed correctly, it looks really nice.
This human face shadow illusion is very interesting providing if you get your finger placement right.
Ducky seemed easy to do but finger bending is tough!
This is another version of the duck. The one with Elvis’ hair.
Fancy a bulldog?
Read on and you’ll see a singing bunny at the end of the article.
Horse shadow illusion.
The little girl did this one but the butterfly version. This is a goose in flight by the way.
Another man version. Watch the video at the end of this article and the finger shadow come alive!
Not bad! Turtle shadow illusion.
The horns seemed a little short for this gazelle but you don’t have such long fingers right? It’s nice nevertheless. 🙂
A good challenge for you all who is trying it out now. A goat to end the slideshow.
Click HERE to check out this cool shadow illusion video!
now that is cool, didn’t know internet can search so many stuff of fingers+wall shadows
Lisalicious,
Have you tried some of the hand shadows yourself? It’s quite fun…
Cool. Perhaps I can use these tricks to teach a baby to understand about animals. 🙂
Yea, its a good method of educating children. And its fun too! Go ahead and try it! I’m still practicing some of it LOL
haha really fun to do i love it oh and i could do all of it and yer it is a very good thing to teach children about