Buying holiday presents for friends and family is always a chore for me. You want something original, memorable but not too expensive.

How about turning some beach pebbles and driftwood into a work of art that your friends will love in just 1 hour and a few dollars ? But remember to make one for yourself to keep the holiday memories alive.

Supplies

Beach pebbles from your holiday or backyard - you want small rounded stones of different sizes for the body and head (mum and baby etc) and cliffs

Driftwood - (Optional) Just small pieces of wood, the older looking the better to look like a clifftop

Small picture frame - Note that the glass should be about 1cm from the back of the frame so the pebbles will fit and not be squashed by the glass

Blue/Yellow paper - To make the background, could also be light green or dark blue, you can use your imagination here, maybe even light pink would work.

Paper glue - To stick the paper to the frame back board

Glue - Hot glue gun to stick the stones to the paper,

Acrylic Paint - Easy to paint onto the pebbles. You will need tiny amounts of black, white, blue, yellow, orange (or use red+yellow to make the orange).

Fine permanent black marker pen - To make the fine lines on the face for eyes and mouth

Step 1: Choose the Pebbles

Select some of the pebbles to make bird shapes, basically rounded stones with a smaller one for the head.

Place the picture frame on top to see how it looks and add some pebbles to represent the shoreline or wood to represent a cliff, dont be scared to move things around to see if it looks better. The older the wood looks the better.

Step 2: Paint the Pebbles

Carefully paint the pebbles using acrylic paint. This order of painting seems to work:

Black (the birds back)
White (the birds front)
Yellow (back of beak)
Orange (made from Red and Yellow in my case since I didn't have Orange paint) (front of beak)
Blue (triangle on the beak)

Allow the paint to dry in between painting the different colors.

The painting doesn't need to be too accurate, the final result will still look good.

Keep some of the orange paint since you will need it to paint the feet onto the paper in a minute !

Next take a fine permanent black pen and mark the face and eye, making a "v shape" for the eye looks good rather than a dot.

Step 3: Create the Background and Glue the Stones On

Using some colored paper that fits the frame, make some kind of landscape. I have used light blue and yellow to represent the sky and beach but you could try other colours here or a single colour will look good too. Make the beach rounded rather than a straight cut to make it look more natural.

Glue the paper to the backboard of the picture frame using paper glue.

Next you can add the cliff and the beach stones by gluing them onto the paper with a hot glue gun. Keep placing the picture frame in place to check it will fit within the frame.

Then arrange the birds on the picture but dont glue them yet, you need to paint the orange feet below the birds in a 3 pointed triangle shape, its much easier to do this before you have glued the birds to the paper. Add a black dot with the marker pen on the end of the feet (looks like small claws).

Finally glue the bird stones to the paper again using hot glue gun. You can add some seagulls by drawing some V shapes with the fine black pen to add effect.

Assemble the picture frame and there you have it, a great holiday momento / present in less than 1 hour.