Student Work

For my upcycle project I plan to use the popular 223 ammo shell cases to make a tank. These brass shell cases were collected after my buddies and I shot targets in the mountains. Since they have already been fired, they are safe to be handled and to be made into artworks. I will be…

Guinness roadster I have chosen to build a can model of a café racer motorcycle, using strictly can part built from aluminum cans and adhesive. Similar to the above photo the model should resemble an actual bike. This is the hardest material I have ever worked with, the aluminum is so thin it dents/ warps quite easily and adheres on contact…

If there’s two things I love it’s beer and the US of A.  So I decided to merge the two and create an American themed mural to hang on the wall made of beer bottle caps.  Originally I thought I would make an American flag, but thats not too original and I didn’t have enough…

After the dawn of flat-screen tv’s Cathode ray television sets became a rare sight in the American household, but a dime-a-dozen in the junkyard.  Despite how many of these tv’s began to make there way out of the living room and on to the curve, very few ended up in recycling centers.  This cathode ray…

Continuing from my last post about Strandbeest I bought a mini strandbeest assembly kit to help me better understand the mechanism and drain some idea. I was able to assemble it as shown in the figures: I also took a video of it “walking” while blowing it with hair dryer but unfortunatly it wasn’t compatible with the website.…

I have been wanting to make a barn door out of old pallet wood for quite some time.  The guest bathroom in my home is also the laundry room and I’m not fond of guests being forced to see our dirty clothes and cluttered shelves.  As you might be able to tell, there is no…

Following along with the aesthetic I touched on in my previous blog post (LINK GOES HERE), I decided to build a table lamp, using a bottle as the base. The inspiration for this design stems from a variety of different sources, some of which are pictured below. Bottle Table Lamp (Source: http://www.bottle-lamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/ToastedHeadBottleLamp.jpg) Wine Bottle Lamp…

My project revolves around pure aesthetic – specifically a lot of color and shiny things and light (all of my favorite things). The main idea is using a ton of glue that dries clear, I will add in different colored glass shards and build a gloriously colorful glass shard tree. As I cannot start until tomorrow…

I decide to make a solar box cooker for my upcycling project. This idea comes from the cookstove class I took in the last spring, which was offered by Professor Hannigan. He taught us about the solar oven. So in this class, I think it is a good idea to make my own solar cooker.…

For my upcycling project I have decided to make a lamp of sorts.  This is the first time I have played with any type of circuitry since 5th grade.  I found a cool piece of driftwood in Northern California over Thanksgiving, while on a roadtrip.  Inspired by a design my friend Davis has made, I…

For my upcycling project I will be taking used liquor bottles and spaghetti sauce jars and turning them into cups and other useful items.  The idea originally came from when my roommates and I did not have many cups and we started using old Prego sauce jars as cups.  Shortly after I stumbled across a…

My upcycle project began when I decided to use paper as my recycled material. Half way through I felt that using fresh paper wasn’t really considered upcycling, and it was more like crafting something from scratch. So instead, to be more in the spirit of upcycling, I chose to recycle old electronics that have been…

If you took a look at my college apartment, you would notice that about 70% of my house is re-purposed furniture. With a limited budget and my desire to keep up a stylish appearance, I have done everything from repainted wood chairs to upholstered garage sale furniture and paint art on the wall. However, all…

Did any of you ever watch Jimmy Neutron as a kid? Do you remember his dog, Goddard? http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/movie/jimmy_neutron/13.jpg   I’m making something a little similar. He can’t fly ,or talk, or think, or light up or even move, but it still has the feel of somewhat of an industrial themed animal. Basically, the inspiration came…

One of my hobbies is to go clay shooting with my friends. I started shooting at a young age with my dad being in law enforcement. When I left for college my dad gifted me his old shotgun as a going away present. When the weather is good, me and my friends enjoy a short…

Over the weekend, I visited the ReSource scrapyard near Arapahoe and 63rd.  I had an initial design idea, but found no materials to follow through with the design.  After browsing for quite some time, more ideas began to flow.  At one point, I found a piece of duct work that reminded me of the horn…

Erick Pena, Gardner Nichols, Mathew Tabor

I wanted to create something unique for the upcycling assignment. I had a accumulated some electronic components from past classes and also from the ITLL to create what I call LED spiders shown in Figure 1. I really liked to watch and sometimes even capture fireflies because of there very interesting feature that they obtain to…

My entire goal for this project was to convince a machinist at CU to allow me to mount a log to a machine mill with no plan at all and just see what happens. Fortunately I was able to convince Mark, the head machinist at the shop in the ITLL to let me do this.…

My idea is to create an representation of a globe using bottle caps (seems to be a recurring theme) and an old basketball that I have laying around.  I think that this would serve as pretty cool artwork for any home, if done right.  I will start by spray painting the basketball blue like the…

Every ten or so years, the bucket hat seems to make a come back in fashion and trendy streetwear. With each life cycle, the style is tweaked, and it somehow resumes a completely reinvented aesthetic. If you do not know about this trend, this article does a far better job at explaining the background that I can: http://www.bustle.com/articles/27831-whatever-happened-to-bucket-hats-oh-wait-theyre-back The current trend of…

I’ve been searching for the right chair to cover. The criteria is that the chair be fairly small with rectangular cushions so that I can wrap the woven material around the corners without much old chair showing through. I think I finally found one that fits the bill. All of sudden our rescue mutt doesn’t…

For my upcyling design I wanted to create a light product/structure. To put it simply it would be considered a lamp or a light fixture of some sort, but I wanted to broaden my design so that the only criteria is that it deals with light in some fashion. I have included below my design…

An attempt to capture the non linearity of a practical, medium to large scale design project with multiple inputs.

For my upcycing project I decided to make a home weather station from some recycled hardwood flooring and some spare electronics I had around the house. To start I used a DHT11 sensor breakout board to sense the current temperature and humidity. These values are read by an arduino pro  mini ($2 from sparkfun’s annual sale a few years ago).…

  I made this pine cone out of aluminum cans. It started as an attempt to make a radially symmetrical candle holder. The cans are decapitated, cut 8 ways at the top, and another can is inserted. A band cut from another can is then placed over the two to provide tension and ensure that…

When I was in the Flow Visualization class I really wanted to do something with molten aluminum.  I couldn’t figure out exactly what to do with it other than casting it (which made it no longer a flow vis type project) so fortunately this type of project was perfectly applicable to the Upcycling project in…

Like one of the aesthetics mentioned, I wanted to use the rustic old wood aesthetic and bring in some Colorado flag art. I found a few old pallets behind an autobody shop on Baseline and 28th, and with the company’s permission, brought one home. Carefully sawing the cool weathered boards out, I salvaged five lengths…

…But it was quite painstaking to make. It’s been more about the process than the result so far. When my mind is racing, which happens fairly often, I take comfort in doing repetitive activities. Sometimes, that can be as simple as chewing sunflower seeds or tossing a tennis ball in the air. In this case, it was…

I was in Hong Kong a while back and came across this shop called “GOD” (Goods of Desire). They were selling handbags made of woven seamstress tape measures. I thought it was a clever way to make a super durable product. Like most things at GOD, these bags were extremely over priced. The next time…

In my opinion, the Chinese Qipao is not only a traditional dress for women, but also genuinely a piece of art. It is featured by stand collar, right side opening, fitting waist and slip bottom, which can fully set off the beauty of the female shape. It is usually made of excellent materials like silk, silk brocade, satin,…

Bigger is better? Not for this spectacle of art. This aesthetic focuses on the art form of regular everyday things in an irregular size – specifically, incredibly small. These tiny replicas, despite being tiny, manage to draw in more attention than it they do at their regular size. For example, yesterday’s lunch? Already forgot. But take…

When I hear the word ATV, short for all terrain vehicle, I automatically think four wheeler because those are the ATVs I grew up with and are the most common incarnation of the ATV.   However, ATVs were originally invented as three wheelers, with the first ATV from a major manufacturer, Honda, shown below. This is…