Andy Warhol Ornapendants Free Holiday Craft Project Idea!

Andy Warhol Paper Tag Ornapendants™ Copyright 2008 Margot Potter

Andy Warhol Flowers 1964

Andy Warhol photographed by William John Kennedy
(Click on images to see close up)

Andy Warhol Ornapendants™
Copyright 2008 Margot Potter The Impatient Crafter™
For Inspiration Only

I bought an Andy Warhol purse last week at TJ Maxx. I really wanted to buy the Velvet Underground banana purse, but the tag on the roll of bills purse was calling out to me. That and the hardware on the banana purse was craptacular. The tag was a thick cardboard photo booth strip of Andy Warhol. Much like Andy, I have an obsession with photo booth photos and have a personal collection taken over my lifetime. As soon as I spied that tag I thought...that would make a really cool necklace. I've been making a lot of paper and recycled art lately, so basically anything that catches my eye that's even remotely project worthy is being dragged into my studio.

At first I was thinking of cutting the images apart, punching a hole in them, sealing them and doing a necklace with them as charms. I was waiting to get through some other projects first and in doing research for another project I stumbled upon the Warhol screen print of pop art flowers above. Then I found the photo of Andy in front of the pop art flower you also see above. So a design was born.

I remembered the Bazzill Basics Really Big Chips pop art chipboard flowers I had on hand and the vibrant colors in the Ranger Paint Dabbers line. The plastic chips are Fragments from tim holtz™ that I placed over Andy's face as a sort of a lens through which one might view him. Warhol loved being obtuse. Then I added some texture with rubber stamps, but I didn't want it to be too obvious what the texture was, each one is slightly different. I added the Grungeboard stars that I painted white and added random accents: a number 15 from a magazine ad, a tiny washer and a plastic clear game piece from Outside the Margins. I dabbed on some Stickles accents and edged the flowers with Krylon silver leaf pen. I needed huge jump rings so I took them off of a really big link metal chain I got from Rings n' Things a while back. To use as an ornament, I'd add a handcrafted 18 gauge ColourCraft wire hook, for a pendant I'd just slide some ball chain through and call it a day.

They're ornaments, they're pendants...they're my newest creation the Ornapendant™!

The idea here is that you can make something similar using your own photos or images you cull from a magazine or paper tags you buy with your clothing, but you can't actually copy images of Andy Warhol and print them out and make jewelry to resell. That violates a copyright. I'm using an actual printed item that was headed for the recycling bin that I'm repurposing, which you can do. I can't sanction violating copyrights, though I have to say Andy liked to bend the rules himself quite a bit. In fact this image was a photograph taken by someone else that he altered and never gave the women who took the original photo any credit.

It's interesting to ponder the philosophical meanings of what is art, what is craft, where are the boundaries, when is it crossing the line, when does commercial art lose it's art world cache? Andy played with these ideas often. Although he was a deeply flawed human, as we all are, he was a brilliant man with a jester like sense of humor and irreverence. So this project is my tribute to an artist who inspires me.

Next time you clip a tag off of something, look at it a little closer and see if it might be art worthy. One woman's trash is another woman's treasure.

xoxo
Madge