Recylcling Wooden Chips

While I was taking painting class I realized that the canvas had wooden chips that were put to waste. The idea sparked me a while back when I was looking for ideas to present a demonstration for my speech class. The following post would be about personalizing wooden chips.

Materials:
Canvas blocks (chips) or any recycling wood
Acrylic paint
Paint brush
Ideas or designs
Newspaper
Water

Depending on your style you may tweak the steps to cater to your needs. Also parental guidance and precaution is highly recommended for children. DO NOT TAKE SCRAPS OF WOOD, that can be dangerous especially for children. Make sure the wood that you do choose is smooth and lacks splinters.

Step 1: In a clear work space (I have a tendency to paint everywhere even in my bed, and thus my mother goes bonkers whenever I get paint on her sheets). Lay down a newspaper or scraps of paper over your work space.

Step 2: Choose your design. It must be easy enough to draw on your small wooden chips (unless you choose to paint on a larger block or plank. For experts you can also paint whatever you like of use an air brush and stencils.

Step 3: Coat your wooden plank or chip with acrylic paint (unless you prefer the woodsy theme) In my case, I chose a black coating for one piece and left the other piece without a coating. I didn't necessarily use full black but mixed a little green in there.

Step 4: After the first layer of coating is dry, paint another layer for a stronger coating. Let dry.

Step 5: Proceed with painting your design. I had two ideas for the black chip, I decided to draw a flower two colors: red and green. For the back side I used white for a calligraphy. For the plain wood chip, I decided to simply draw (or more like write) down a calligraphy with a black pen.

Step 6: Let dry and you're done.

Step 7: Clear space when your done with water, paper towels and discarding them in respectively. Clear away acrylic paint on your body especially away from children.

My finish products are seen below:

There is also something symbolic with the two designs. The black chip with the words BTS and my failed Korean calligraphy for the word "Army" is meant as a tribute to me and my friend's favorite Kpop idols BTS. The black over white background is the color scheme seen in the idol's 'bulletproof vest' (as they are called the bullet proof boy scouts). Although it is simply wooden chips I recycled from my canvas, it would make sense for my imagination to see it like a shield or a gun, an inside joke only the fans understand.

Well how did I do?

Cheers!

Gift Ideas: QR Codes Hunt and Web dedication

I love blogs, I love creating websites, thus one of the gift ideas I decided to do for my friend's birthday is a scavenger hunt using the mode of QR Codes and a Weebly blog site that I created. You can assess my full blog here or you can look at the gift site here. (Note: you'll most likely consult the second link)

As I mentioned in my previous post I'll be doing a post about utilizing QR Codes and a website. You can use any medium you like, for me, I chose Weebly despite the fact that I could have done it in blogspot or wordpress.

The idea is simple. First you need to think of what the theme would be. Because my friend is a fan of Cassandra Clare's books, namely the Mortal Instruments (televised also as Shadowhunters) I decided to create a website with that as the main theme.

Materials:

- A computer (or electronic device with access to the internet)
- An email or a blog account in Weebly, blogspot or wordpress (these are all free sites with the option to upgrade for more features)
- A QR Scanner app on your phone
- Some knowledge in website building and an idea of what you want for your site.

For the QR Scanner, you would need to create your QR Codes via a QR code creator, there are a bunch of QR Code creators online for free.

Step 1: Create your blog site (or weebly site)
Step 2: brain storm your ideas.
Step 3: Note down your scavenger hunt ideas (or you could search online for themed scavenger hunts [but where is the fun in that?]
Step 4: In your blog site, have a question or scavenger hunt.
Step 5: In the QR Code generator write down the answer in the "text". The cool thing about QR Codes is that it can convey secret messages and you don't need internet to access or convert them, you're QR Code scanner would do the work.
Step 6: Test your QR Code to see if its working by scanning the code with your phone.
Step 7: Download the QR Code as an image in your computer
Step 8: Upload to your blog

And you're done!

If you're using blogger (blogspot): You could simply create a blog post with the questions and insert the images via the "insert image" icon.

For weebly it would be a little trickier.

Follow steps 1 to 3 above.

Step 4: Once you created your weebly page, you'll be directed to your site. Depending on whatever theme you choose for your site (weebly has a selection of themes) you can start by dragging the icons from the editor (in the left)

Step 5: Choose the title icon and drag it to the white space that says drag here. Edit the text to whatever title you want.

Step 6: Drag the Image icon from the editor to insert your image, and select your image (the QR Code) from your computer.

You can move everything around and add as you go along. Be creative, and have fun! Weebly offers a tour on how to use the features, or you could always consult YouTube for more help.

Step 7: Don't forge to save by hitting Publish at the top right corner.

And Presto, you have your personalized online scavenger hunt and web dedication. A perfect gift for millennials and tech savvy people who love a new way to play scavenger hunts.

To take the hunt a little further...

I had the idea of choosing something memorable and making it like a puzzle piece. Below is a the painting I previously blogged about. I choose this because it was quite memorable, my friend whom I am giving the gift to, helped me create this piece.

The image below is the finish product of my photo card, despite it being plain, you'll soon know the reason why.

Though I didn't do it, you can create puzzle pieces with your master piece, I chose to create only one puzzle piece (photo card) because I didn't want to risk wasting materials and replicating the whole painting. There was also a reason why I made one you can see it below:

The idea of having a scavenger hunt stemmed from here. Instead of writing it in the entire photo card, I decided to take my grand explanation and present it in a way that it continues to endure, even if the card was lost.  I glued the QR Codes that I created (which contains a personalized message and a link to the scavenger hunt website)

Well, did y'all like it?

Cheers!

Personalized Gift Ideas

Hey! It's been a while since I've posted here. Lately I've been busy with a gift I was making for my friend and thought I'd post it here.

I'll be doing two posts. One would be a Website-QR Code scavenger hunt that you can view over here or you could manually copy and paste it on your browser over here: http://ravingpandaaaa.weebly.com/gracias-surprise.html.

The other part (which is this post) would be the steps on creating a playing card set that you can personalize (I had an idea of using it for ESL or for teaching little kids or you can simply use it to give tribute to your favorite Pokemon training cards lol).

Materials:

Computer (or gadget with an access to the internet)
Scissors
Printer
A box (or whatever medium you wish to place the cards)
Glue or tape.




Step 1: Go online and search for your card sets. For my product I decided to make a set of Shadowhunter rune cards based on the tiles I saw in Cassandra Clare's website

(Note: I do not claim the website or ownership to Cassandra's runes, or the idea of playing cards. This post was meant for educational purposes and crafting ideas.)

Step 2: If you're more tech savvy than me, feel free to do whatever you like for this step. What I did was use the snipping tool from my computer and manually crop all the tiles into a Word Processor.

Step 3: Edit the images as you like (make sure that all the tiles are the same size) and print. Note: If you chose the runes page, the snippets should be the perfect size when you paste them in your word processor.

Step 4: Cut out the cards



Step 5: (optional) Paste the cards in construction paper (or some kind of thicker paper) and cut the cards out. Note: I didn't do this part, but I would have done it if I had enough construction paper.

Step 6: Place the cards inside whatever medium you choose to put your cards, in my case I used a jewelry box that was surprisingly the perfect size.

And Viola~



Personalized playing cards!

Well? How did it go? Share your works of art in the comments below and Cheers!