crazy ideas

When is it Art and When is it just Mess: An Exploration.

/ Marjorie Sanpietro / Leave a comment

During these last few weeks, I have been working on quite a few projects. I had a yard sale and THOUGHT I needed something else to keep me busy. So I started working on a desk and chair set I found on the side of the road.

I started out painting the wood parts white with plans to use blue metal enamel that I had purchased for another project. The white paint didn’t really speak to my soul – so I started decoupaging the chair with ripped pieces of dictionary pages (one of my favorite materials). I broke out the enamel to do the metal and just sort of said huh…I wonder what that would look like on the paper.

My husband called on his way home from picking up auction purchases – another new hobby of ours…and I told him I was either making art or a mess. That’s how I still feel about it. So what’s the difference? And how far is too far? Comment below to let me know.

Sometimes you make a mess when you’re creating a piece. That doesn’t mean the completed work you make is a mess. I’ve been making little signs out of pieces of wood. The wood almost looks like the back of stamps, but they stand up well. I was trying to stencil a tiny pineapple on a couple of tiny pieces. I went through 8 pieces to get ONE perfect pineapple – I still need to get another one but I’m a little worried about going through 8 more!

My point in telling both of those stories is to remind myself and maybe you that creativity is a process and not everything we make is going to be perfect and may take a couple of tries. We should keep trying if we have that creative spark. I know that I have to feed mine.

Making Large Paper Mache Dinosaurs – pt.1

/ Marjorie Sanpietro / Leave a comment

My 6 year old is a very creative kid and when he decided that we needed to make were some BIG dinosaurs – my brain went right to paper mache for this project because it’s inexpensive and these dinosaurs don’t need to weigh 100lbs each.

I was really impressed when I suggested it to him, because he knew exactly what I was talking about and related it to a display he had seen at school. He decided that he’d like us to make a stegosaurus first AND THEN if that worked out, we could try a T-rex. 

To begin with, I needed some reference material. We looked at a couple of his dinosaur books so I could get a general shape for this stegosaurus. I drew and cut the torso pieces out. I created the head and tail pieces separately so that I could try to position them a little different from the rest of the body – realism counts when you’re making dinosaurs, y’all.

The boys helped me out by tracing my first pieces onto other cardboard – you need at least two of everything to give it some volume because we’re going for 3D! They also helped by making some plates, spikes, and feet for the stegosaurus to be used later. 

To continue building the shape, I connected the top of the stegosaurus more narrowly than at the bottom. I attached the main pieces by adding strips of cardboard of the correct width along the sides and held the whole thing together with masking tape, slightly angling the head and tail. Before I closed Mr. Stegosaurus completely up, I stuffed him with recycled newspaper to give him some mass for better stability.

Here’s Mr. Dinosaur in our living room – hanging out waiting to be permanently sealed up – you can see the tape starting to have some problems.

I’m not sure what was going on with the masking tape – maybe it was too cheap for the job? We put the stegosaurus aside for a few days but the situation became critical when it didn’t seem to be staying together anymore. 

It was definitely time for some good old fashioned glue and paper. I typically use an approximate 50/50 mixture of water and PVA glue. We tore up scrap paper and pasted it on the frame of Mr. Stegosaurus – sealing up all the seams and making any last minute adjustments.

Next we started bulking up the body. I used paper towel rolls to begin forming the legs and then larger pieces of paper scrunched and otherwise manipulated to add more body.

At this point – we were using the same crappy masking tape and I got frustrated – so it’s been sitting for about a week now. I did go buy some better masking tape. We’ll see how it goes…to be continued.

Comment below if you’re excited to know how this project turns out!