I love making typography 3D, and papercraft is an easy and fun way to do this. After a year of my viewers asking for it, I finally made the video tutorial of the method I’ve developed. Click through to the video description on YouTube for a list of materials and instructions written out. And I hope you enjoy the video and the additional photos I took of the final product!
Over the past few months, I’ve had a lot of fun creating decorative wine bottles, so I wanted to make a video showing everyone how to make my favorite one – the map collage bottle. I’ve been really inspired by content posted to various map-related Tumblrs lately, and collaging the maps in this way makes for a really interesting and beautiful texture. I also had fun using the macro lens I borrowed from a friend, and may have gone a bit overboard with the gratuitous focusing. But, I hope you enjoy the video and additional photos below, and let me know if you decide to make one!
A few years ago, I had the idea to make a miniature copy of the book Paper Towns by John Green, and film the process of creating it. John’s newest book The Fault in Our Stars was just released about a week ago, so I decided to redo that video, except with a copy of TFioS. I hope you enjoy watching, and check out more photos below!
Thanks again to kaysyconundrum for allowing me to use her gorgeous original song in the video.
Last week, I finished my six-week stint as a woodworker after I took a Woodworking with Handtools class during Wintersession. This class was offered by the Industrial Design department, and I jumped at the chance to take a 3D class for the first time basically since freshman year. It was a bit of an adjustment, but once I became more comfortable with the tools (and stopped feeling like I was going to cut off my fingers with every move), I began to enjoy it a lot more.
The thing that stood out the most to me in the medium of woodworking is the time that must be put in to make a quality product. I’m used to the instantaneous world of Photoshop, where a thousand variations can be made and compared within minutes. However, with woodworking it is all about the imagination and trying to picture in your head what the finished piece will look like, without having the luxury of an undo button.
I also grew slightly frustrated at how long each project would take to complete. For example, I spent about six full days over the course of two weeks on the bowl you can see above, and while it is a nice bowl, I’m not entirely sure that it was worth two weeks of my life. When I was learning graphic design, I would be completing projects and moving on to the next challenge much more quickly, and while many of those early projects are not very well-designed at all, I learned a lot from each one. However, with woodworking, it takes much longer to complete each project and it was a big adjustment to get used to working at a slower pace.
The bowl above was my first carving project, and the dish you can see below was my second. I remembered to take process photos for the second dish, so you can see it change from a solid block of wood into the finished piece.
Unfortunately I accidentally deleted all the process photos I took from here until the finished product. In between was a lot more carving and an entire day devoted just to sanding the surface to be perfectly smooth.
Neither of these projects are entirely done – I still need to add a protective finish to the wood. Both are carved from pine, using only handtools such as chisels and files. While I don’t think I will be spending a lot of time in the wood shop in the future, it was a great experience to be thrown out of my comfort zone for six weeks.
I always mean to make blog posts about the videos I post, and then just kind of forget. But this one is happening, even if it’s a week late. First, check out the video of me painting a steampunk bubble gun, and then read on for a bit more behind-the-scenes info.
I got the bubble gun from my friend Robyn after the Times Square bubble battle, since she didn’t want it anymore. While it was cute as is, I thought it would be even more awesome if it was painted to be steampunk. As you can see from the video, I first sanded the plastic a bit so the paint would stick better and then put on a white base coat. It would probably have looked neater if I had used spray paint instead of acrylic, but I didn’t have spray paint and acrylic is a lot easier to do quickly. Then I just kind of went crazy on it with the brown and blue paint, which I then went over with gold to look a bit more aged. I thought the whole thing was looking a bit grimy overall, so then I decided to make the little doodads that I glued on bright white to add a bit of contrast. It was tough getting the cartoon head to not look so cutesy, and I probably should have done what one commenter suggested and used modeling clay to alter the shape of the head to begin with. But I did the best I could for my first time trying this style, especially in the only about five hours it took.
When it came to making the video, I knew even before I started that I wanted it to be set to Joseph Birdsong’s song Hologram, mostly because I’ve been obsessed with it since I first heard it a few weeks ago. The outfit I wore at the end of the video is one I just kind of put together in about fifteen minutes before I left to film it. The shirt I got from a vintage clothing store in Brooklyn a few weeks ago, and the skirt is actually a dress that I picked up from a free stuff pile at the end of my sophomore year of college. I got the bow headband at Forever 21 and the tights for $2 from Urban Outfitters. I had brought black heels with me to put on, but I thought the grass was long enough that you couldn’t tell I was still wearing my Converses, but I was wrong and that ended up being the main thing I wish I could have changed about the video. But I think it came out really nicely overall, and let me know if you agree!
