Post Tagged with: "creative reuse"

MailArt 365 #1: The Big Hi-Fi Sound

There’s something magical about getting a piece of real, handmade correspondence in the mail, especially these days. This year, I’ve been trying to make mail art on a regular basis, so when I heard about the MailArt 365 project, I immediately signed up to create one piece of postal art a day for a year. The project officially began in December, but they’ve extended the deadline so that we latecomers can participate.

For my very first Mailart 365 project, I used an old audio card that I found in a thrift store to make a piece for a music-loving fellow with whom I recently collaborated on a very challenging web development project. He only knows me in a work-related context, so this’ll have an element of surprise.

The audio cards were apparently part of the 1979 “Audiotronics Tutorette System,” which seems to have been a reading program similar to “Hooked on Phonics.” (Here’s a fantastic video of unorthodox creative Audiotronics use.) I particularly like the audio magnetic stripe along the bottom and the prancing puppy illustration. I added two old 45 single covers to the front and back of the piece, and collaged in some old lighting gels from another thrift store.

March 24, 2011 1 comment Read More

Grocery bags, gift wrap & good fortune

My mom is one of the most creative, loving, hilarious, and wonderful people in the world. She’s the sort of person that brings delight and laughter wherever she goes. It is the highest stroke of good fortune and grace that I get to be her daughter.

In honor of her birthday week, I decided to send her a package of a few small surprises, gift-wrapped with love and vibrant color, plus a few sweetgum fruit and peacock feathers (my favorites) thrown in for good measure. I made the wrapping paper from a re-used grocery bag, joss paper purchased years ago in Oakland’s Chinatown, and pages from old magazines. Love you, Mom!

January 12, 2011 0 comments Read More

Another anemone anomaly

Made at sunset on a chilly evening, from two brown paper bags full of paper towel rolls, cut into thirds, then painted with an old sponge brush, inside and out.

December 16, 2010 2 comments Read More

Halloween 2010: Year of the Cat(Bot)

I had a bunch of lofty — some might say far-fetched — ideas for this year’s Halloween costume. Owl with rotating head and glowing eyes. A giant honking Canada Goose, as a salute to Lake Merritt’s glut of geese. Oversized haunted kombucha scoby. (Don’t ask me how that last one was supposed to look. It was more conceptual, really.)

As the weeks began to whiz by, the reality of what it would take to execute a multi-textured, papier-mache-enhanced, and probably highly flammable costume this year began to sink in.

Cut to Halloween morning and still no costume. In search of some sort of visual inspiration, I visited the Depot for Creative Reuse and took a look through the cardboard recycling bin in the basement. And from a last-minute whirlwind of spray paint, aluminum foil, CDs and vent duct tubing, CatBot 3000 was born.

CatBot 3000

To make CatBot’s head, I spray-painted a medium-sized cardboard box, and reinforced the edges with chrome tape. The eyes are scratched-up CDs covered with a discarded plastic spools that I painted silver.

I found the piece that would eventually become CatBot’s mouth in a pile of packing material. It looks like it may have been some sort of keyboard cover at one time. The nose is an old bike reflector, and CatBot’s ears are just pieces of cardboard that I scored and bent, then covered partially with aluminum foil and attached with duct tape.

November 7, 2010 1 comment Read More

Anemones and sweetgum fruit: Nature-inspired cardboard sculpture

Sea anemone-esque piece made from toilet paper rolls

Following up from last week’s cardboard toilet paper roll project, I decided to try experimenting with cut texture and a bit of paint on a few of the rolls. It was fun!

Back of the toilet paper roll wall piece

Back of the piece

To me, the result resembles fruit from the sweetgum tree, a sea anemone, or some sort of sun-dried daisy bouquet. I’d like to create an entire wall of these, and cut them at different heights to create a bit of a rolling effect. It’d also be fun to paint these with more aquatic hues and put these on the floor as an installation, since they do look a bit like tide pool creatures.

August 24, 2010 4 comments Read More

Postcard for a sweet friend

Here’s a collage postcard I made from pages of two found books (a 1960s piano instruction textbook and a book called “Breeding Society Finches,” oh la la!), joss paper, tissue paper from the tissue flowers on my birthday cake, and a homemade cyanotype.

I hand-painted it with gouache, and sent it with love to my dear friend and kindred spirit, filmmaker Kirthi Nath.

August 11, 2010 2 comments Read More

Rolling, rolling, rolling…

I’ve been experimenting with making a few wall pieces out of the humble yet ubiquitous cardboard toilet paper roll. I really like the fact that, when squished and glued together, they look vaguely like a honeycomb, or something cellular.

I found some beautiful and inspiring work being made out there using cardboard toilet paper cores: the narrative, miniature worlds of Anastassia Elias’ Paper Cuts series, the expressive masks of Junior Fritz Jacquet, and Yuken Teruya‘s branching corner forests.

I think the next step for me may involve color, and possibly unrolling the tubes themselves to create different shapes. It’ll be fun to keep experimenting — and the media is almost never in short supply.

August 11, 2010 20 comments Read More

(Totally landlord-compliant) bubbly wall art made from recycled toy capsules

The living room, with new recycled capsule wall hanging. Who needs wallpaper?

One of the few down sides to our apartment is the regulation against hanging anything on the plaster walls. The superintendent warned us that our walls, painted a smooth, cool buttermilk, were not to be nailed into, painted, or altered in any way, under penalty of losing our deposit. Yikes.

One Saturday, B and I went to the always-wonderful East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse for some possible visual inspiration. Wandering amid aisles of castaway curiosities and recycled objects, we found three boxes filled with hundreds of discarded brightly-colored plastic toy capsules, the kind you’d see in 25-cent vending machines (UPDATE: thanks to the discussion on the BoingBoing post, I found out that these are actually what’s known as Gashapon capsules, made in Japan!), clear orbs with tiny trinkets inside.

They were too much fun to pass up. We bought the entire lot of them, and brought them home.

Each of the capsules had holes drilled through the top and bottom, like a giant bead. We hit on the idea of stringing them together as a wall hanging, using heavyweight fishing line and hanging them in rows from the top of the picture moulding in the living room. I ordered a economy-size box of picture hangers from a framing supply store, and the project was ready to go.

Detail of the capsules. They make a great rattling sound when they're all strung together.

Detail of the hangers and the capsules.

There were two challenges about this particular undertaking: wielding a giant strand of plastic spheres overhead while balancing on tip-toe on the back of the couch inches from the wall; and the fact that the weight of the capsules causes the fishing line to be stretched once they’re hung, thus creating a “rather unsightly” (ha!) gap between the hanger and the capsules. We solved the problem by winding the extra slack line on each strand around the picture hanger after the capsules were hung.

(UPDATE: By request, here’s a photo of the hangers and the fishing line. You can cut the fishing line closer to make it less obvious. Since we have high ceilings and the line is clear, it’s not so visually distracting — although it’d be interesting to try painting the hangers white or covering them in some way. Any ideas out there?)

I keep going back to the Depot to see if they’ve got any more extra toy capsules to cover the other part of the room, but I haven’t seen any yet.

I do, however, have a box of 500 extra brass picture moulding hangers, just in case.

August 10, 2010 24 comments Read More