Snail Painting

Fed up with snails eating you garden? Fancy a bit of artistic creativity?
In this instructable we will show you how we turned a humble bunch of leaf-munching pests into colourful mobile artworks.

Step 1: Find your snails

Snails like eating, procreating and doing absolutely nothing. During the day they mostly do the third. You'll find them hiding in clefts of plants, under garden debris,in crevices in walls and so on.
Best to gather a few and then go back for more as you use them up - suprisingly for such inert creatures they can be quite difficult to corral in quantity. Use an old platsic lemonade bottle with the top cut off or similar as a holding-pen.

Comments

[Totysheep]

seriously fun instructable!!!!

[clockworkdoorbell]

Thanks, it was fun to do

[dark sponge]

This must do wonders to the snails' camouflage! (good luck hiding from predators with a orange and blue checkered shell!)

[jnhenkel]

agreed

[Totysheep]

Maybe the colours trick the birds in thinking that they're poisonous? Besides, they're just snails, they'd probably get eaten either way.

[milesduggan]

I step on them and then paint them.....wait scratch that reverse it.

[Hougashucka]

that is mean beacause a snails shell is supposed to be a shelter and camoflauge from any predators, im sure you would be happy when birds attack the slow moving helpless targets!!!!

[prometheus442]

I think it's actually unhealthy for them too. I was always told you shouldn't buy painted shells for your hermit crabs because...I guess they'll die. It's actually not good to put acrylic paint on yourself because the heavy metals will find their way into your blood stream.

[Arc Trooper 5555]

Non-toxic paint or something like face paint would work!

I LOVE SNAILS!!! :)

[santy22]

but the snail shell is hard!

[chocogrape]

hmmm... It might be surprising to find a glittery rainbow snail on the ground...awesome instructable! Too bad i only have very very very very small snails in the yard if any. : |

[BakeandBloom]

I want to bedazzle one.

[canida]

OOh, I want to see!

[d3monhax0r]

make some strips of gooo so the snails follow it number the snails then get some friends over and bet on which snail gets to the end of the strip of gooo first =D

[mouthwashninja]

Those are hella huge snails! I live in South Texas, and the biggest snail shells I've ever seen in the wild were about the size of a dime.

[clockworkdoorbell]

The snails are Scottish snails - not originally here, but introduced by the Romans a couple of thousand years ago - to eat, same variety as the French eat (escargots). Snails get pretty big in other countries - like the kauri snail in New Zealand (kauri).

[Arbitror]

Or the Giant African Land Snail!

[crazed rhetoric]

OOOO! And the Giant Pink Sea Snail!!! ( from the old Dr. DoLittle)

[crazed rhetoric]

For every one that you paint really colourful, you could paint one camoflaged. It would be cool to see one with digital camo on it lol. Or you could do it red and yellow, or neonish. I think that those are the "danger" colors that preditors look out for.

[11richie21]

try salt

[solo.card]

I can't believe this is featured.

[cloggy01]

Im making one like a eyeball

[cloggy01]

WOW! now you should make a tv show called "Pimp My Snail" :D and im so doing this

[weaponscollector94]

i did something similar one time when i was a kid, i got a bunch of snails and gave them numbers 1 through 30 and one day my mom was like "Levi why is there a snail with 23 on it's back" and i told her about my little project and she thought it was hilarious! also you can go out during an evening after it has rained and you can totally tag a bunch of snails! it is pretty funny

[maditatai]

i like the blue and green one

[Arbitror]

Awesome!

[kevin71127]

led's in snails! nice!

[casey321b]

you would have to find and emtpy shellf and wire it al up and find a slug to go in it. it owuld be realy hard to get the slug the right size to fit in it

[Arbitror]

One problem: Snails are attached to their shells!

[santy22]

or you caould make a throwhi and stick it on the snail.

[Solderguy]

Or you can super-glue it to the snail. That way it won't croak.

[Prosthetics01]

Lol. (all i can 'say')

[SugarTeen52]

Aah, ha ha ha. Oh, chuckle chuckle. Hee hee ho hoo. Hooo. Ah. That was fun. Well, now, how does one come up with the idea of painting snails? P.S. That video... hahahaha! Excuse me. Oh, the music. That was awesome! Haha.

[clockworkdoorbell]

Last year I noticed there were a lot of snails in my garden - so being a tad nerdy I started to wonder just how many?... I decided the best way to find out was to catch as many as I could, and mark each with a number. I marked about 50. Thereafter I was looking for snails, when I remembered to, and seeing what proprortion were numbered. It wasn't until my neighbour came round one day and said that she wasn't sure, but, she 'thought she'd seen a snail with a race number on it' that the surreal possibilities dawned on me.

[santy22]

so you were like "hi there, #43 snail!"

[SugarTeen52]

Haha, that's so cool! I've found maybe two snails in my lifetime though. Where do you live? (Don't put your address all over the internet, I just mean, like, what state or something)

[xenobiologista]

There's a good way to count wild animals even if you can't catch every single one, that field biologists use. It's called mark-release-recapture - what you do is, catch a bunch of snails and paint them.

Then some time later, catch snails again, and work out what proportion of the painted snails were recaptured, which lets you calculate the total number of snails in your garden. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_and_recapture

[CookieLuver]

I used to love doing this with my friend. one we painted 50 of them and stuck them on a wall. Its fun to see one that you have painted a few years later. :)

[dkfa]

What is the whole point of the flour and water thing?

[mmh]

Very amusing and creative. But, why do I sense you have waay too much time on your hands? It does look like you got the silver and red snails excited about each other's new digs.