How Artists Can Make Use of Cardboard Boxes

Artists get a reputation for being a little out there. And really, it comes as no surprise considering their creativity levels are typically off the charts in comparison to the average person. Sometimes when the average lay person observes a masterpiece of art, well, they just don’t get it. I mean, I don’t necessarily get it either. There’s just too much going on that my eyes won’t ever detect without the proper training.

Artists are often classified as people who paint or draw, but the range of media that artists can use is pretty much as wide as the human imagination allows it. There’s virtual reality art, art with recycled materials, and even art made using human volunteers.

So, we’re here to talk a little about packaging supplies and how they can be used in an artist’s arsenal. And really, most of these items consist of cardboard boxes and how they can specifically be used, even if they aren’t displayed in the art.

Splatter mat

Some forms of art involve flicking paint at a board and letting it drip down. Splatter art is actually somewhat popular, especially because most people would say they’ve heard of it before. But this sort of art can be quite messy without proper planning, so a lot of artists put down plastic tarps to avoid getting paint on the floors or walls of wherever they’re composing their art. Another alternative way is to break down some cardboard boxes and use those instead. It requires no money so long as you’ve got a few boxes laying around. Artists are typically depicted as having low incomes, right? Use that cardboard!

Using them as a medium

Come on, you knew I had to be going in this direction with this article. If you’ve never seen cardboard art, you’re seriously missing out. I encountered my first interaction with cardboard art just a few months ago at a local festival, and the guy who ran the stall had some extremely good pieces for sale. For him, the only cost accrued was paint. Cardboard, though, was pretty much his for free.

What’s really cool about this medium is the potential to use broken down boxes as 3D components, where one layer is in the “background” of the piece and another element juts out forward. It seemed like the possibilities were endless with this sort of medium, and it really came off as a medium for beginner artists and people who were more advanced in their career.

Moving Your Business from One Location to the Next

So you’re expanding. Or you simply found a place that was much cheaper and in a better location now that your location’s lease is up. Either way, you’re absolutely stoked to have found something better for your company. Of course, you’d hope it’s the expanding that’s happening more than anything, because good things are coming to you and your business.

But when moving your business from one place to the next, things can be quite stressful. Really, really stressful, to be honest. You’ve got to close for multiple days (and sometimes weeks) because you’ll have no product on the floor to sell. This alone can cause your business to take a hit. So the quicker you move, the better. But quicker isn’t always better if it means something breaking, people getting hurt, or rushing for the wrong reasons and causing some sort of unforeseen accident.

No, you want this to go smoothly and successfully so that you don’t have to do it again (or worse, pay for anything you broke).

See? Isn’t it stressful already?

But it doesn’t have to be if you have everything you need in order. First off, having everything you possibly can packed up and ready to go before closing your store down will greatly save you on time actually moving. While you’ll still have product on the floor and your store will be open, you’ll still have taken care a lot of the packing in order to minimize the amount of time your store is actually closed.

From there, a big chunk of time will be dedicated to actually moving. So rather than attempt to save money by having you and a few others help move, get the entire team in on it. I promise that you’ll be losing more money having your store closed for the moving alone than you will in wages for those who help you move. Don’t forget to stock up on packaging supplies before your move too, as those very packaging supplies will sincerely help everything stay safe and intact in transit.

From there, it’s really all about having a plan in place for the new store before you actually make the move. Hopefully you’ll have visited the new location many times before now so that you can get an idea as to how you want your product laid out. Once you’ve arrived with the product and everything else, you’ll want to get it all in the store ASAP so that people can begin moving things around.

Obviously, a lot more than just these “simple” tips go into effect once you’re actually making the move, but my advice boils down to this: have a plan in action; don’t be short staffed during the actual move; and do not underestimate the entire move itself.

Why Packaging Tape is So Important

When I think about packaging tape I start to think about the Eiffel Tower, or about refrigerators, or email.  You might think that these things don’t have very much in common at all, but they do.  They are all products of a new age, an age of technology.  It kind of blows my mind to think about technology at all.

Like, when you look at an old diving suit, one of the first ever invented, you see these boots weighed down and this metal cage of a helmet, and an air hose that only allowed you to go underwater about twenty feet or so.  Even at such a shallow depth, it was still considered to be extremely dangerous.

I can kind of get side-tracked when I pick up a roll of packaging tape because I get a little overwhelmed thinking that we have it.  And I don’t mean that every single person owns a roll of packaging tape, but that in a universal way we have it.  Whereas less than a hundred years ago packaging tape did not exist, no one thought about it, it never popped into anyone’s minds when they were considering a project.  It just didn’t exist.  And now it does.  Something as simple as packaging tape exists, but with it comes this entire history of growth and technology.  With it comes the development of factories, and assembly lines, the union, the evolution of ideas, and the improvement of a product in sync with the improvement of equipment.  There is just so much.

I think about my dear grandparents, both of them getting close to a hundred years old, and I start to feel really at awe when I consider what they have known in their lives.  To come from extreme poverty and prejudice, a world absolutely decimated by war and terrorism, consisting solely of starvation and fear.  And then a world of opportunity, of cleanliness and newness.  But not only that, it kept growing.  It kept developing.  They went from using horses to plow fields to watching their great-grandchildren operate mini-computers that know everything about everything.

Literally.  There is more food than anyone could think up on their own, and easy access to it, and easy access to the easy access, and so on and so on and so on.  I wonder if it makes you go a little crazy, watching the progress of it all.  I think it might.  Or maybe it makes the rest of us go crazy, all of us that have been born into it, or brains just exploding as soon as we come into this world…

Packaging Tape is Good for Setting Records

I have this friend of mine, and he recently got put in the McGilly’s Book of World Records, which is kind of like the Guinness Book of World Records but not nearly as cool. (Don’t tell him I said that…).  Guess what he got put in for.  You’ll never guess.  I’ll just tell you: packaging tape.  You’ve got that right.  He bought rolls of packaging tape for years, pretty much ever since he was a kid, and then he proceeded to encase an entire house in it.

There was a lot more engineering that went into the process, of course, and it was legitimately a labor of love that consumed his life from ever since he was a small kid, but it wound up being really fascinating for a lot of people.  The most appealing part about it was that it was an interactive piece, a real house in the middle of a real yard, with a real mailbox out front that was even wrapped up.  It was this part that wound up making him so much money.  The piece (their words, not mine) was advertised well in advance, along with fair warning that it wouldn’t last forever due to the level of interaction and exposer.

This made people want to be involved all the more.  So from the first opening night there were lines going all the way down the street.  I saw people paying some serious money to move farther up the line, and I was like, “Seriously?”  But it’s true.  They wanted to go through a house covered in packaging tape that stinking bad.  The line was open all night, until the last person had a chance to go through.  Which means we were there until just about three AM, which.  It was the the same the next night, except even worse, because word had spread and a lot of people were back.

It was almost like a tailgating party with no tailgates.  There were a lot of coolers on wheels, or grills on wheels.  People were completely sold out to this whole thing.  In the end, the piece only ran for about three weeks until it had completely dismantled, and when it was done the pieces of packaging tape were framed and sold for ludicrous amounts of money.

I never did find out he made from it all, but suddenly he was driving a much nicer car, and he said that he at least made back whatever he had spent on all the packaging tape over the years.