Paz

Two cautions specific to this being a soft toy rather than a loose part.

Protect the fabric. Abrasive slurry and polish will get into the plush around the eye and it is very hard to get out. Mask the area with tape and a slit card around the eye before you start, and change it when it gets loaded.

Test on the less visible eye first, or on an inconspicuous edge. Plastics vary and some react badly to solvent-based polishes — clouding or crazing that appears minutes later.

Also, work in short sessions and look at the result dry. Wet plastic always looks fixed because the water fills the scratches, which is exactly the illusion that makes people stop too early or keep going too long.

Since the marks do not need to survive, the simplest answer is far better than any printing trick: print on ordinary white paper and use it as a template.

Two ways:

• Temporary adhesive. Spray adhesive or a repositionable glue stick, stick the printed sheet to the black card, cut through both, then peel the paper off. Cut lines, fold lines and numbers are all visible while you work and gone when you finish.
• Print and pierce. Lay the printed sheet over the card and prick through the corners and key points with a needle. Remove the paper and join the dots with a bone folder or a light score.

The first is faster for complex shapes, the second leaves absolutely no residue. Both avoid the entire problem of getting a mark onto black card.

A cutting machine, if you have access to one, solves it a third way — it cuts from the file directly and never needs to mark anything.

The paint half is worth separating out, because that is where most of the confusion in art classes comes from.

Mixing pigments is subtractive — each pigment absorbs some wavelengths and reflects the rest, and mixing two means light must survive both. So the result is always darker and narrower than either component. Red and green paint give mud because between them they absorb nearly everything.

The subtractive primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow, chosen because each absorbs roughly one of the three cone channels while passing the others. Printing uses those for exactly this reason.

Which means the red-yellow-blue primaries taught in school are neither of these systems. They are a historical convention from pigments available centuries ago, they mix badly, and they are the reason so many people arrive at colour theory believing the whole subject is inconsistent.

On whether to give it to a fourteen-year-old, since that was the actual question: the honest answer is that it depends heavily on the specific card and on the child.

The considerations:

• Some of the pieces are sharp, and the edges after snapping out are rough and unfinished. Cheap examples in particular have burrs that need filing.
• Fish hooks are hooks. The barb is the part that makes a small injury into a trip to a clinic.
• It is not a practical tool. The steel in a stamped card is thin and soft compared with any real knife or hook, and it will not perform well for actual fishing.

So as a genuine piece of equipment it is fairly poor. As a novelty object that prompts an interest in the outdoors, it is fine for a mature fourteen-year-old, ideally handed over alongside a conversation and a file for the burrs.

If you want a gift that actually gets used, a decent folding knife or a small real fishing kit would serve better at similar cost.

There is exactly the tape you want and it has been used for a century: gummed paper tape, the water-activated kind used for sealing cartons.

It is kraft paper with a dry starch adhesive on one side. You wet it, apply it, and it bonds into the surface of the cardboard as it dries rather than sitting on top of it. Once dry it is paper — it takes paint, gesso, glue and further layers exactly as the cardboard does, and the joint disappears under a coat of primer.

The reinforced version, with fibreglass threads embedded between two paper layers, is considerably stronger than plastic packing tape and still fully paintable.

This is also the traditional material for the same job in scenery and papier-mâché work, which is a good sign that it holds up.

One technique note: wet it enough to activate the adhesive and not so much that the paper goes limp. A damp sponge in a shallow tray is the usual method.

Seconding the thermal label printer, with the caveats worth knowing before buying one.

No ink, ever. Thermal printing burns the image into heat-sensitive paper. That is the main reason these are so convenient for frequent short prints — no cartridges to dry out between uses, which is precisely the failure mode of an inkjet used twice a day.

The print fades. Thermal paper darkens with heat, so labels left in sunlight or a warm car will fade over months. For task lists that get thrown away, irrelevant. For anything archival, disqualifying.

Check the label type before buying. Some rolls are permanent adhesive and some are removable. You want removable, and it is not always the default.

Check the software. The cheap ones vary enormously in how pleasant they are to drive from a computer, and that is what determines whether you use it daily or abandon it.