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.
Cardboard star (with a handful of red-violets and purples)
Cardboard star (with a handful of red-violets and purples)
In the midst of this fall’s busy whirlwind (and noticeable lack of blog updates), I made a few little messy experiments with color on these little pods. I realized too late that the key is to paint the insides of the cylinders first with a foam brush, before painting the outsides. Even though they’re a little sketchy and messy, I do like the purples and red-violets on the petal shapes.
Anemones and sweetgum fruit: Nature-inspired cardboard sculpture
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 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.
Rolling, rolling, rolling…
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.
(Totally landlord-compliant) bubbly wall art made from recycled toy capsules
(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.
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