3D Papercraft: Festive Winter Scene

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If winter has your homeschool in full-on cozy and crafting mode, we have a beautiful, 3D papercraft that you and your children will love. This papercraft uses bright colors and a three dimensional design to create a festive, wintery village scene. While younger children can help with parts of this craft too, it’s an especially great project for older children because it utilizes sequencing skills and requires some cutting. The finished product makes a gorgeous decoration to display in your home. Since the design isn’t specific to any particular holiday, you can enjoy making and admiring this craft through the holidays and into the remainder of winter!

winter papercraft

What You’ll Need:

Free Printable Templates

How to Make It:

To get started with this craft, first make sure you’ve downloaded and printed out all of the free templates that are posted above. When you print them out, you’ll notice that each of the layers shows a rectangle with a different shape inside. You’ll want to cut out and trace the rectangle shape onto four sheets of white cardstock and cut them out.

Then, get your X-acto knife out and use the different patterns of templates for each layer to cut out a unique shape inside each card stock rectangle. You should end up with four white, cardstock rectangles with a different shape cut out on the inside of each one, as in the below picture.

Tip: it can help to immediately label one side of each cardstock rectangle with the layer it is supposed to be. Do this as soon as you make each one, and it will simplify the next few steps.

Next, before you start gluing anything down, arrange your layers, starting with the bottom layer and building it up to layer four. The above tip helps a lot with this, or you can print out an extra copy of the template to help guide you. Primarily, you want to check to make sure that all of your rectangles of cardstock are the same size, and that the layers of shapes inside each square line up to look like rolling hills of snow.

I know that already looks pretty good, but don’t glue anything yet! We still need to add the awesome 3D effect! This is easier than you might think. All you need to do is take your foam board and X-acto knife and cut out several strips of foam board (at least 16). The foam board strips should be about the same length as your cardstock rectangles.

Next, take your back layer and arrange/glue four foam strips onto it like a frame, as shown.

Then apply some glue to the top of those foam strips, and lay the cut-out for the second layer on top of the first one, as in the picture below. As you can see, the foam strips separate your two layers enough to create a 3D effect!

Continue this process, creating a frame between each layer of your cut-outs until you’ve glue down the final (fourth) layer. At this point, you should have a 3D scene of rolling hills of snow!

And now comes my favorite part: adding in the finishing details! We’re including a free printable template for the decorative houses and trees we used in this craft, but of course feel free to add some of your own unique touches as well! Use the templates to cut out the decorative items in your colors of choice. I think that bright colors work the best in the white background of this craft!

Once your decorative items are traced and cut out, have fun arranging them into your winter scene. As much as possible, slide the items in between different layers of your snowy hills. This definitely makes the 3D aspect of this craft really stand out!

Keep adding houses and trees until you absolutely love it! If you have several members of the family doing this craft together, it’s always fun to see what different kinds of villages everyone comes up with; no two will look the same!

We hope you enjoy making this beautiful 3D winter scene! And if you enjoyed this craft, be sure to check out our Gingerbread House 3D Papercraft, too (the same supplies are needed for both, so you already have everything you need!)

Do plan to try out this Festive Winter Scene 3D Papercraft? Let us know!