Student Work

At this point, I have sketched up my idea for my upcycle project and have collected the necessary items from my everything drawer to make my idea come into being.  What I will be making with these items is a laser maze.  Essentially it will be an organization of mirrors on a board, which the…

When I was younger, and highly untidy, my parents would tell me “A place for everything, and everything in its place” to help teach me organization.  As I grew older, I realized that there was a loophole to this saying. This loophole was the everything drawer. This was a designated drawer in the house where…

“Kawaii” or “cute” is an aesthetic that has become widespread throughout Japan, and it started gaining traction as early as the 1950s. Rune Naito is credited with being one of the earliest pioneers of this aesthetic, with the creation of his “Rune Girl” characters, defined by their large heads and baby-faced features. Big eyes and…

The progress for the upcycle project is going well. I have collected all of my needed wine bottles (plus quite a few extra) and have already begun trying to score the bottles with the glass cutter. If this technique doesn’t work, I have also seen videos of people dipping a length of twine in acetone,…

After considering the different ideas that I had for my bottle cap project, I decided to go with creating a bottle out of bottle caps. Once again, thanks to Ben Chang for the idea! Now that I had my idea, I needed to figure out how I would bring it into being. Generally, I had…

Welcome back to my project dear reader. It is a couple days until this project is due and to be honest I feel slightly flustered by the conclusion of this project. I have now cleaned all of the bike and moto-chain, welded the base and one of the branches. As it happens, it is much…

I was shocked at our combination. Our team (Ryan Weatherbee and Jackson Hootman) attempted to figure out a way to combine this object and aesthetic. Street photography was characterized by striking contrast and the concept of “urban”. Urban brought strong visuals of graffiti to me which I tried to incorporate in my image.  We first…

All materials for my upcycle project have been selected. I will be utilizing scrap quarter inch black acrylic for the majority of the construction. I have additionally found some scrap wooden rods with enough length to cut 12 six inch pieces. This is just under double what is required. Below is the CAD model I…

Last time of Aesthetic of Design: Upcycling Project… In Magic: the Gathering, many cards with beautiful art go unplayed because they are uncommon, or not good enough. The idea of this project is to laser cut these trading cards and stack them on top of each other, thus blending different iconic artistic styles as well…

Name: Justin Lim, Kevin Yang, Bryan Wong Object: Strandbeest Aesthetic: Coffee Service

While I have the Solidworks model of what I’d like to initially test, I hope to test new ways to make curved cardboard rails. Here I have the start of the rollercoaster where I plan to have a loop and two turns.   I utilized the Integrated Teaching & Learning laser cutters. I did edit…

The latest update with my upcycle project comes as I have decided on a design and purpose for my scheme. I have decided that I’m going to go with the rug idea as the other directions might be better options for a main project sometime. After doing some research on different styles of mats and…

For my mosaic project, I have decided to create four different pieces that symbolize the four classical elements. I think this directly represents the meaning behind the project, and by using recycled materials we are bringing awareness to the mass amounts of materials that are being wasted daily. With the big topic of climate change…

My weekly progress is going well with my upcycled vinyl billboard wallet. Main concerns were the flexibility of the material, its work-ability compared to leather, and its structure. All of these concerns seem to not be an issue, with initial progress in sewing the wallet. Figure 1: Initial sewing test, figure shows what one side…

For my upcycle project, I’ll be creating an art-piece out of those plastics caps. Right now, I got all my materials: Cardboard, around 1000 bottle caps ( thanks to CU Recycling Facility), and the “glue”. I had taken some of the caps that I got and placed those into a plastic container and soaked with…

Currently, I am preparing for the ‘building’ stage of my project. I have accumulated most of the materials I will be using for the project and solidified on general form and shape of the sculpture. My initial thoughts and sketches of the form is displayed below: The final sculpture will consist of an arm gripping…

For my progress report, most of my efforts have been in the theoretical design, as well as determining the minimal amount of beer cans necessary to create the structure without collapse. I have determined this number to be 62 total cans, shown in my sketches below. Since this is a massive amount of beer it…

The egg is going so much better than expected! Among my materials I have: egg shells (tanned and white) white cloth balloons paint brush Elmer’s Glue Also, not pictured, I used a plastic cup to hold my egg in place, a lid to pour the glue, and a hair tie to secure the cloth around…

Moving forward into my garden plant box, I took my initial idea and did a few hand sketches to fully figure out what I was planning on doing.  I then acquired my materials from Resource located in boulder. I was able to purchase all of my wood for 8 dollars and 50 cents. I was…

With regards to my upcycling project, I have already acquired all of my materials as of 02/04. All of the wine corks were shipped in and I am now in process of cutting the backdrop for the wine corks to be secured to. With the backdrop, I am considering instead to utilize cardboard (due to…

Great progress on the upcycle project has been made over the last week! After narrowing down the material I wanted to use (expended bullet casings) I was able to make a trip out to Lyons on Sunday to collect brass from one of the open-land shooting areas. As always, there was an abundance of brass…

This is an early stage of the painting. I had made the canvas out of three cut up cardboard pieces that I hot-glued together. I then spent a lot of time laying out the Popsicle sticks and finally hot-glued them to the boards. I then drew out an outline of the painting and made the…

So, as it goes I decided to change the direction of my upscale project. I had originally planned to manufacture my own wooden beads using the wood lathe in the ITLL, however this proved to to not align with the purpose of this project as well as I had originally hoped. First, the quality of…

So far, I’ve started gathering plastic spoons and I’ve collected a few empty soda bottles. I will still need to get a light bulb cord and a light bulb for my project. I’ve also started considering the different shapes I could create. I did some more research on the idea I had for my project…

For my upcycle project, I wanted to somehow incorporate a vintage/romantic aesthetic into my artifact. I already have an old physics book, that I am not going to read. So I wanted to put the book to good use and make it into something else that serves a purpose. I decided to first hollow out…

The project I have chosen to go forward with for my UpCycle Project is a hemp lamp constructed from scrap wood and materials found in the ITLL such as wires, light bulbs, and hemp. My main tool for cutting the wood is the laser cutter in the ITLL. I have spent all semester up to…

As of last week, I started gathering material for my project. I have found two pieces of wood in the manufacturing center in the ITLL that I will be using in my coat hanger project. Unfortunately, I was unable to find two similar pieces of wood, but this should be fine since I am going…

Shortly after making my inspiration post, I found an extremely similar process conducted by a craft-cycle.com user “McKenzie” posted to the site – https://www.craft-cycle.com/upcycled-receipt-notebook-2/ – on August 3rd of last year, with pretty promising results regarding notebook/sketchpad functionality. Reading through this post addressed a lot of my own concerns regarding how I would proceed with…

My biggest hurdle so far is determining the final shape of my project.  I originally imagined a spherical sun catcher, but since I’m breaking glass and other materials with a hammer, I am unable to make any geometrically symmetric shape. I’m aiming for an ornament resembling a sphere, so there will be no sharp edges…

My upcycling project is a sculpture of Kirby, laser-cut from cardboard boxes taken from my workplace’s recycling. After further consideration of how this sculpture will come together, I realize I will likely want to find scrap acrylic and wood from the cutters’ location as well, to give certain features a bit more flair. Here is…

The only progress on my upcycle project so far has been obtaining these large pieces of cardboard. They were sitting somewhere in the house and after a while it took me a while to find where they were hiding. These large cardboard sheets will make it very easy to cut the pieces and layer them…

With Greg Whiting we explored an ideation technique in which we picked a noun from one small box and an aesthetic from another. Regardless of their randomness, our task was to pair them together and redesign that noun with the aesthetic that we drew. After 10-15 minutes we were asked to draw our new design…

My two-way leather wallet is well under way. For the wallet’s materials, I acquired a leather purse from goodwill and got some pretty strange looks from the cashiers… This purse had nice leather, however was a little lighter than I was hoping. I took the purse apart and drew out the template for each side…

The first step of things was to restore the sawhorses. I used a wire brush and sandpaper to clean the rust off of the brackets and clean the wood before staining. Raw sawhorses cleaning the brackets cleaned sawhorse right raw sawhorse left. After restoring the sawhorses I played around with how I would orient them.…

On Monday 02/03, we had Prof. Greg Whiting as a guest speaker. He presented us with an aesthetic game where we had to connect two random things into a drawing. In a team of 4, we were given the following topics: electric toothbrush + Kaiju (strange creature or giant monster in Japanese), and the final…

We did a design exercise using a product and an aesthetic. Product – Snowblower Aesthetic – Biker Culture

So far everything has been going well with my mycelium aka I haven’t killed it and I haven’t contaminated it. The following image is a depiction of my planned fabrication process. Mycelium Fabrication Process Unlike the picture above, I already started growing mycelium from store-bought oyster mushrooms. This meant that I could skip step 1…

When I started brainstorming on aesthetics and concepts for this project, I had a few ideas come to mind. Namely, I thought of using wine corks to create a koozie, broom bristles and rubber bands to make a pencil holder, a wine rack made from old cans, and plastic spoons and plastic bottles to make…

In class, we selected an aesthetic and an object from a hat. As a team, we brainstormed ways to combine the two. Team: Danny Straub, Sarthak Bal, Will Tse, and Max Armstrong Our team drew the Harley Davidson aesthetic and a Snowblower as the object. We thought this was a good pair because they both have…

Group Members: Kyle Neubarth and Fiona Bell Object: Set of Screwdrivers https://www.lumberjocks.com/mafe/blog/25939 Aesthetic: Shabby Chic “a style of interior decoration that uses furnishings that are or appear to be pleasantly old and slightly worn.” -google dictionary http://www.home-decor-ideas.com/2017/04/tips-to-take-your-shabby-chic-interior-to-the-next-level.html  

Group members: Justin Engbrecht (myself), Patrick Bodine-Ellison, and Benjamin Robles For the Aesthetics Game this semester conducted by guest lecturer Dr. Greg Whiting, our table received the object “Coat hanger” and the aesthetic “Novelty Architecture / Roadside Vernacular Architecture”. We initially had no idea what this aesthetic was, and had to google it to find…

Group members: Ethan Elshyeb, Kaiya Wahl, Xiang Luo Here is our designs for the Aesthetics Game during the guest lecture. Our topic was to create soda/beer drinking hat with holder and straw in nerd culture style.

For my upcycling project, I draw inspiration from my day-to-day need of a folding table. This table has various functionalities and is used for a wide variety of applications. I have decided to draw ideas from the readily available products in the market and to further modify it in a way that it addresses many…

For my upcycle project, I am creating a side table that fits the industrial-modern aesthetic. The table will be made from square steel tubing for the structure; the top will be made of varnished pine wood. The aesthetic that I am trying to emulate with this project can best be shown by the following image:…

We were tasked to find a way to upcycle something preexisting to be art or something useful for our first project in this class. I have a passion for indoor houseplants and wanted to make something that would fit this theme. Originally I thought of making a trellis for my plants but that wasn’t  quite…

Today we went over the specifications and due dates for the Upcycle Project. We talked about the critique method we’ll be using for the presentations: Lerman, Liz. Critical Response Process: A Method for Getting Useful Feedback on Anything You Make, from Dance to Dessert. EBook., 2002. Then we looked briefly at the difference between traditional…

The advantage of using a computer to make art is that you can achieve the precision of complex designs with ease.  I have not completely decided on my project yet, but I would like to use a laser cuter to do some cuts and engravings on recycled cardboard, wood, or paper. My first inspiration came…

The Project Magic the Gathering is one of the world’s most popular trading card games. It incorporates the strategy of other card games with solid world building and breathtaking fantasy artwork. The main inspiration for this project was the admittedly predatory pack system. Magic cards are ranked by rarity, with “common” cards typically being less…

To be honest, I was not very sure what I wanted to do for my upcycling project until yesterday. What I struggled with the most was narrowing down the ideas I had because the project has almost no restrictions or guidelines; we can do almost anything we want. Two weeks ago when we first were…

In my original post, I described a lot about how I want to build my project, but my inspiration for this comes back to Tolkien’s books I read over break. As I was reading The Hobbit, and the Fellowship of the Ring I was amazed with the detail of his descriptions of his characters and…

For my upcycle project, I wanted to work with fast food wrappers in some manner. Ultimately, I’m tentatively deciding on building a sculpture of some sort – I think this will be one of the striking ways to transform something which we consider useless and essentially trash into something that is visually pleasing or meaningful.…

Mosaic Art     My inspiration for the upcycle project is mosaic art. Not only does the history of this art form fascinate me, but the creation of mosaics makes me really excited as well. Mosaic art originated from Mesopotamia, and is compiled bits and pieces of colored glass, stone, clay, and others. The very…

For my upcycle project, I drew inspiration from the internet. I searched the internet for ideas on upcycling and came across an idea that seemed artistic yet functional. The main material I am planning on using will be plastic spoons. I plan on creating a lamp using the heads of the plastic spoons as decoration.…

This project of the upcycle has been an interesting challenge thus far. I’ve thrown around ideas about many different types of materials and designs and haven’t felt content with any one idea. I then started thinking about who I am and what materials would make sense from a standpoint of what I already have and…

The inspiration for my upcycle project is my mom. Being that she loves trendy art that is suitable for display in our house, I figured I would create her a wall piece to hang in our house. My mom is originally from New Zealand (hence the reason the featured image is the New Zealand flag)…

For the upcycle project, I immediately thought of using wood as one of my main materials because I have a lot of scrap wood in my garage, plus the ITLL has plenty of scrap wood in the shop downstairs. I also knew I wanted to use the laser cutters to become more familiar with them…

I’ve always been a strong proponent for sustainable living, therefore the idea of a project focused on reusing material excites me. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do for the Upscale project, and I’ve landed on the idea of making my own wooden beads for bracelets. It may be biting off…

When Professor Hertzberg mentioned in class that a key component to many upcycling projects is the volume of materials used, I knew I had to use a material I could get a lot of for cheap. It just so happened that my roommate had a hamper full of plastic bottles from a failed recycling project…

Featured image credit: Ghana ScrapRegister   To make money while in college I picked up an Information Technology job 4 years ago and have been surrounded by computers and electronics ever since. As a result of both my employment and my interests I have a considerable amount of scrap electronics or “e-waste” sitting around my…

My inspiration for the upcycle project started with the abundance of old wine bottles that I have sitting in my apartment (as a form of trashy decoration). This means that I took the material first approach. My ideas started with light fixtures and maybe making the wine bottles into something of a chandelier. I thought…

For my upcycling project I plan to create a piece of wall art from an old brake rotor off my dirt bike.  Dirt biking has been a defining hobby of mine since sophomore year of high school. I started off riding a trail bike, but quickly realized I wanted to do more than just putt…

The story of my inspiration came from two weeks ago… One of my classes is called creative climate change, in this class, we have a professor named Patrick Chandler, who presented one of his past work experience, of working with the Washed Ashore Project. The project itself is about reusing the marine debris, trash gathered…