In my Sculpture II class we were given a project using brown paper lunch bags. There were no limitations on what we could do with them as long as they were used as an installation piece. Sounds pretty easy, right? Well here’s the catch; we had about two days to do it. We also had to take pictures of our piece that we installed.

Last week I talked about making origami butterflies and I thought this would be a perfect opportunity use them in my project. Since its in the middle of winter and there are barely any signs of wildlife I thought I would make some. My idea was to bring spring into winter by simply creating a scene found during that time. It makes people do a double take if they were to pass by this piece because it’s something you don’t see in the winter. The butterflies and the egg are pretty accurate in size but the coloring isn’t.

When putting this project together I wanted the colors to be natural but have a slight fantasy feel about it. The blue color in the butterfly wings match the egg; making it appear that they are connected in some way. I used metallic gold and silver sharpies on the wings of the butterflies so that it would pop against the brown paper. Then blue acrylic paint on the egg and wings as a unifying color. The egg was made out of two spoons taped together because I couldn’t get the paper rounded enough.

I really liked the challenge of working in a short time period using such a common material. There were a lot of ways it could have been used but it was left up to the student. I feel like that makes it harder because there are no guidelines to help you which pushes you to think outside of the box. In the end it helps you grow as an artist because there really are no guidelines when it comes to art.