How to Make a Balloon Tiger

Dale Obrochta: Hi! I am Magical Balloon-dude Dale. I am a professional balloon entertainer, and we are working on balloon animals and the how to today is to make a tiger. So let's get into the tiger mode and actually produce a tiger and then after the tiger we are going to go and create a star. So let's be a star.

Alright, so we are going to start out with a balloon that is better than three quarters filled. We are going to have about a two inch tail on this and what we are going to do is we are going to start off with a small one inch bubble. We are going to make a two inch bubble, and at this point we could release this bubble, because it's already been stretched out. We could always come back and make it just easier to work with.

We are going to make a two inch bubble. Make sure we twist three times or four times. Make another bubble approximately the same size, twist. We are going to spin these two together, just like the dog's face or the mouse. We are going to make a one inch or two inch bubble again. This time we are going to do what we call a roll through where we twist this through. This is going to be the muzzle or the face of the lion.

We will do another one inch to one-and-a-half inch bubble. It's called a one-and-a-half inch bubble, followed by a three quarters inch bubble. All my bubble is going to be the same size as this, so about one-and-a-half . We will do a one inch bubble followed by a one-and-a-half inch bubble. So larger, smaller, larger, smaller, larger.

We are going to take those and twist them together. If you notice it's going to look very much like a teddy bear head except these proportions are different. Now, taking this balloon, we are going to do our one inch bubble again. Bring it up and into the center and squeeze, a little pull. Again, squeeze these two together. Give it a pull and twist it. We now have the lion's head. In the back, it looks like a big teddy bear. The teddy bear head with the roll through clear body and just one extra bump.

Now, what we are going to do is make a small neck. One inch bubble. Let's do about two inches for one leg, two-and-a-half inches we will measure. We put them together. We will do a body. Measure our legs, back up. The legs are about the same size. We now have our lion.

Add some detail. We have one eye, other eye, whisker. Looks good. If we are going to make a tiger, we could get add the stripes. We have our tiger, and next step is that we are going to become a star and actually make a star. So get ready and let's twist some balloons.