Creating Gifts

About some time ago, I made my mother a birthday present. Much to her dismay, the present wasn´t truly hers. I made the gift out of a very selfish reason and the reason being that I hated to see the bland metallic electronic box in the wall.

This is why I created an artwork covering the metallic box completely while gifting it to my mother as a birthday present. Two birds with one stone as many may call it. However, I am not writing this article because I wanted to complain about the bland box outside my mother´s and my rooms.

Today, I am writing this article because I wanted to explain the creative process and how I finished the arduous project I have set for myself. So without further ado, I would like to start with the creative part of this process.

My first thought was how to cover the bland white electronic box in front of my room. Since whatever way I choose, it must make the access to the box still easy and not something that will take a lot of time and effort to remove.

That strikes out doing anything on the box itself and posters in general because a poster is way too thin. One would still be able to see the box underneath it if I should simply decide to put a poster over it.

It had to be something that would cover the box and since I am no electrician, I asked my dad what he would suggest I could put in front of the electronics box to cover it up and still make the box easily accessible.

My father suggested a wooden board with an indent, which hides the box by containing the box so to say. I could have created anything I wanted on that wooden board that would hang over the electronic box. 

For the record, I wanted to start the project in an effort to cover the electronics box half a year earlier. My dad at that time even had the perfect fitting wooden board for the blank space. But I completely forgot about it and my dad used the board for another one of his many projects which turned out quite well.

Back then, I simply wanted to draw a giraffe with its head in the cloud on that board. Since the board was rather long and less so wide which is why a family portrait wouldn’t have been possible since all family portraits were at that time horizontal and not as vertical as I like them to be. 

However, the project dissipated from my mind since I was living in my uni dorm instead of my parent's home and could not be reminded of the total metallic blankness every day. Whichis also why I completely stopped thinking about the potential image I could create.

Then the summer vacation came and after travelling here and there for a few days, I was at home for the rest of that time which meant I was bored. Whenever I am bored, I tend to think about doing something and after I passed that metallic box one morning, something seemingly slapped me in the face. The fact that I wanted to finish the project for quite some time. 

I was reminded that I had a project planned. But what should be on that on that board? It was somewhat frustrating to think of anything after a while since normally I am very creative and can easily think of an idea that I wanted to do. In my mind, there is always a list of projects I am desperate to try out. 

Nevertheless, for this project, I couldn’t think of anything useful. However, lucky for me, I was reminded that my mother’s birthday was coming up soon. In shock, I also realized that I didn’t prepare a birthday present for her. I mean I was planning on making her favourite cake for her birthday but in my mind that was most certainly not enough.

Then something just clicked. My mother’s birthday and the project I oh so desperately wanted to start. Now looking back, it took an embarrassing amount of time to think of that plan. I mean two birds, one stone. It was staring me in my face. 

From there on out, it was rather simple to figure out what to do and how to do it. My mother had a lot of interests and loves. But I knew that one love of hers would bring her the most joy and that love being her home town. My mother is very fond of Taipei especially after we left it. And luckily there is a very famous, tall and iconic building in Taipei.

Since I was also fascinated with nails and string art, everything just fell into place after that idea was formed. Now that the idea was there and a plan formed in my mind, I just had to start putting that plan into motion. 

First, I had to create a template which was harder than expected. Since I wanted to create a tower just like the real one standing in Taipei and as it turns out, there weren’t many accurate colouring pages for that famous landmark.

The idea of the colouring book page was nearly instinctive. Since I made the first nail and string art with a colouring book page as a template and I would like to say that it worked out quite well in my favour since the pineapple turned out fantastic.

Since colouring book pages were not an option, I opted for the more arduous one. That being taking an image of Taipei 101 and creating a colouring book page myself so to say. So I sat down, found a good picture of the 101 where everything is visible (which was harder than anticipated) and got to work. 

Using a drawing program, I placed a layer on top of the picture and got to drawing. I didn’t know then but I do know now that there were so many small details that needed to be drawn so that the picture is complete. 

I wasn’t willing to spend too much time on details since details take up a lot of time and too much detail can really crowd a finished artwork. Nevertheless, that still left a lot of vital details. Sketching the outline took some time but what took way longer was deciding where the nails should go. 

To pinpoint the exact location where each nail should be positioned on the board, I took a starting point and drew a line along the outline until I was met with an intersection or the line couldn’t follow the outline anymore. After all the dots were placed, I counted how many dots there were so I know how many nails I needed to buy. 

Since my father was the hardware store person and you could never enter a hardware store without him, he took me nails and board shopping. On our way back from my father's favourite store, we also stopped by a store to get some yarn to connect each nail. 

After everything was bought, I started getting to work the very next day. Since the board needed to be indented, we didn’t buy a white wooden board but instead, we bought a wooden board which I can paint in any colour I want. 

Since I didn’t want to overcomplicate the colour scheme of the piece so I chose to paint the board white. The Taipei 101 would have a beautiful white background. Another reason for the basic colour is simply because I don’t want to go out to buy anything since we had plenty of white paint at home due to a rather not-so-recent house renovation.

Very much to my dismay, it took many layers of paint to cover everything. I also noticed that the paint has a more three-dimensional texture in comparison to water colours so I had to repaint some layers because the lines formed by the paint were all over the place.

After the paint dried, I printed out my colouring book page with all the dots where the nails would go. Since the board was bigger than A4 I had to print the picture in smaller parts. It took some time to figure out how big my board was and how big I needed to print the picture but after three attempts I managed to get it right.

Afterwards, I taped the eight A4 pages onto the board and got to work with the nails and hammer. Since I was not willing to lose any of my fingers I also got a piler to help me stabilise the nails. As it turns out, even when the template is magnified, some nails are still very close to one another which made some parts really tricky but I survived with all fingers and a wooden board intact.

When I was done hammering in all the nails, I removed the template since the last time I made the mistake of removing the template after I was done stringing it up. With all the strings in the way, it made removing a simple piece of paper a living hell. I could rip out the template since it would ruin the string so I had to carefully remove the paper with scissors and tweezers since I didn’t want to ruin the finished art. 

After I removed the template, I realized that the nails were quite dirty and made my whiteboard rather grey. So I decided to repaint the dirty parts after I was done with the whole project since it made little sense to me to repaint while still working on it. I know myself all too well for me to make the mistake of correcting my mistakes before I was ultimately done with it… again.

The next step was the stringing of the strings. While I was stringing the artwork, I added some nails to create a fuller pattern. The yarn did tear a few times because I pulled it too tight and, much to my surprise, the nails were too sharp and cut through the yarn. So as much as I wanted it, I cannot claim that it is a one-string artwork because it is not.

Since the one-string claim was out the window anyways, I decided to spice things up a bit by adding a bit of colour. There were small details that could be strung with a different string which would make the artwork a bit more interesting than simply just using one string for the whole thing. 

After I was done with the strings, I taped off the dirty parts of the artwork since I didn´t want to repaint the whole thing due to the whole texture streaking situation. So I covered up the edges and got to work repainting.

The texture streaking issue as it turns out was not much of an issue but an unseen potential. Since the edges of the artwork were rather bland, I thought that I could draw something along the edges to make the artwork seem less bland.

However, after some consultation with many opinions, I have been convinced to leave the edges as they are. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help myself when I used the texture streaking to create a subtle pattern.

The texture under the tower is horizontal while the edge´s texture was vertical. It is a subtle detail that one can only notice if one would take a closer look at the artwork, which makes the artwork special in my opinion.

Now that I was done, I did some calculations and realized that I spent more than 10 hours, 300 nails, 5 m of yarn and a lot of paint to finish the artwork. Not to mention the work my father put in so it could be hung on that wall.

Since the present was too big, I didn´t pack it. I just left it on the couch after my mother went to sleep. The next morning she was amazed as far as I can tell and rather perplexed as to where the artwork should go.

After my father hung it up, my mother understood it and really appreciates it. Until this day she still wonders how I did it but it was worth it. I guess to a certain extent presents for people I care about can take a long and cost a lot but at the end of the day if they like it all that effort was worth it.