Video transcript
The Arts Unit @home Art Bites – Trash totems – 4. The details

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KATE STEHR: Welcome back, everyone. Episode 4, we're here already, of Trash Totems. My name's Kate. If I haven't introduced myself to you before, or you missed episodes 1 2 and 3. I'm an art teacher in a high school and an artist. If you have missed the first three episodes, I really encourage you to go back and have a look, because we have started making a really amazing totem from trash, thus the title of this episode.

So we've started to get a bit of structure. Now I really want to strongly indicate to you guys that this is still a work in progress. OK? I've only just started to build things out. We obviously haven't done our sides. We haven't started to bring our back out. Now, you may remember that when I showed you this example one, I made a face not only on the front but also on the back. So you can do that. Or you can still have a tail. It could have a dragon's tail. It could have hawk's tail. You could get some newspaper and scrunched up into a bit of a rope and actually have something that's a little bit more long and sinuous. Lots and lots of options. Keep on going, OK? And remember, all those off cuts, they are the best bits ever for adding in details and just really adding some interesting layers to your totem.

One thing that I didn't get time in the last episode to mention to you was what you can use good old toilet roll for, which very easily make an ear shape. So you can use, for toilet ears, your paper towel roll, but I'm just going to use the standard one here.

I'm just going to gently-- I'm not going to press too hard because I want it to go back into its original shape. I'm going to get some scissors, and I'm just going to cut in a bit of a scoop shape. If you can see that there against my black top. And then when I push it back out, you can see that I'm starting to get-- looks a little bit like a horsie. I can pinch that in, alright, and really get it to start to look three dimensional.

If you think of a dog's ear when they've got pointy ears, how they've got that little cavity in there. Now if I'm struggling to get that to glue onto my totem sculpture, I could get my Stanley knife and cut a little slit to get that to sit in there. But that's a really great use for your toilet paper rolls.

But what I want to talk about now is starting to get to that point where when we are here and we're really, really happy with all the sides of our totem, how can we go from cardboard, if we're not happy with the cardboard, to a surface that's going to help us to decorate a little bit more easily? As I said, I'm quite fond of the cardboard look, but if you want something a little bit different, you've got some options.

So you can get some spray, just some spray paint. You'll need to get someone who is over the age of 18 to purchase this for you. It's not particularly expensive, but I really encourage you to use a dusk mask and to do this outside somewhere well ventilated.

What you want to do if you're using spray is give it a good shake. You obviously heard that rattle before and you don't need to be right up close to your sculpture. You want to be about 25 centimetres away, and nice, smooth strokes. Make sure you're lifting your sculpture up and looking at it and getting into all the nooks and crannies with the spray paint.

The only downside of the spray paint is that some paints that you paint over the top of it might not stick very well. So acrylic paint sometimes doesn't like to stick to certain types of spray paint. If you wanted to use this, a good tip might be then to go to your paint pens.

I'll just reach out here. Excuse me. And your paint pens, there's lots of different brands. So these are an option for going over the top of your spray paint.

If you've got paint at home and you want to paint your entire surface with one particular colour, you can do that as well. Obviously, that's just getting a brush, and again, making sure that we're really getting into all the nooks and crannies.

One of the problems you might find, though, when you are painting, if you haven't done a surface coat, is that these little edges that we were using before to our advantage to get curves, can be hard to get the paint into those little gaps. So there's a little tip that I'm going to show you now, that we're going to use the good old toilet roll and a little bit PVA glue to try a bit of a 'paper mache' technique.

So paper mache, you probably heard about it before. You may even tried it in primary school or somewhere in high school with newspaper. We're going to do it slightly different technique here in the sense that we're going to use toilet paper. And the reason that we're going to use toilet paper is because it's thinner and you can get into all the nooks and the crannies a lot easy.

So what do we need to do? We need some PVA glue, but you don't want to use it straight. You need to thin it down a little bit. So that's what my glass jar here is. What this is one part glue and one part water, and I would call it a thin cream consistency.

Now as I mentioned earlier, you don't have to have a massive, big set of paint brushes, but it's a good idea to pick a decent-sized paint brush, because otherwise, it's going to take you forever to do this.

Next thing that you need to know is that you can work in sections. If you try and paint your whole surface with glue, the glue is going to dry before you get the opportunity to go back and do your paper mache. So I'm just going to do a little section on his beak, and show you, and talk through that as we go.

Now prep yourself, now this is the industrial roll of toilet paper that I've got here, so it's single ply. If you are living the lux life and have the two or the three ply, well done you, you might not need to double up. OK? So I'm going to double mine up because it is the single ply, but if you're going for those lux levels of toilet paper, feel free to just use one.

So I'm just going to get a bit of my watered-down glue mix. I'm going to scruff a little bit of that on there. And I know I keep on saying nooks and crannies, but you need to get into all the nooks and the crannies, particularly on those edges.

Now this doesn't have to fit, this amount of toilet paper where I've glued, OK, because I can come back in and make that work. So what I'm going to do is now paint over the top, and I'll just turn him so that you can see him a little bit better.

And I am smoothing that down now. Do be aware when you are using this technique, you're never going to get a perfectly smooth surface. But personally, I actually quite like that slightly textured effect that you get from the toilet paper, paper mache. I kind of see it as looking a little bit aged, which if you think of the history of totem poles that we looked at in episode one, I think kind of suits the look that we're going for.

But you can see, as I'm going, I'm able to tuck any little scruffily edges over with my paintbrush. If you get bits and they fall off, that's OK. Don't worry about it too much. But you can see already down the line of his nose or his beak here where I had that opening that was probably going to be a little bit difficult to paint, I've now been able to put a surface over the top so that when I go to paint, it's going to make my life a little easier.

Another advantage that you'll find is that this will actually hold everything together, particularly once it's dry. It's going to make your structure nice and firm. It will have those little cornices that we put in earlier inside of our box, and this will be kind of like a nice tight blanket over the top of our totem pole, to really hold everything together, if we didn't manage to do that with our hot glue gun or our stapling or our tape earlier in the lessons.

So it will probably take you a little bit of a period of time to do this technique, but it is worth it. Once you have started, it doesn't mean that you can't stop and go back to it. So you could do a little section and then go and do something else.

But what I will suggest is that once you have got a section or got the whole lot of him done, if he's wet, you've got to leave him to dry. If you've got the time, I'd say two days but at a minimum a day. So if it's a sunny day, you can put him outside, and he'll dry a little bit quicker. But you really need to let this dry completely before you go back in and do any decorating.

I really hope you give this a try. It's a great technique, and it can be used for lots of other things.

Next episode, we're going to be looking at our final details, all the fun stuff, the little really finesse that we can get onto this totem pole. I really look forward to seeing you. Enjoy having a trial of this technique.

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