Go Big or Go Home!!

My latest hobby has found me being a pin-pusher. That's right, a PIN-pusher, not PEN-pusher.
The thought crept up on a me a few months ago when I kept looking at a rather vast, empty wall in our apartment that deserved more than just a few small, wimpy looking pictures hanging on it. Thanks to our lofty ceiling, the wall looked so open and felt like it needed a rather large painting or some sort of art-peice, but it had to be large. Being a firm beleiver of the expression, "Go big or Go home", I set right to work.

Having a bit of a background in the arts, but having no skill whatsoever in painting etc, I thought about setting out to make a rather large painting. Reallizing I really have no talent at all.... I thought of doing some sort of modern art, splash of paint kinda thing, perhaps somewhat representing a sunset or so, might look kinda funky. Do-able, but not sure if that's what I wanted.

Then one night I dreamt up the idea to do an artpiece out of carpenters nails, driven right into the wall, and make a Massive pointillism type drawing, but with nails. Hmmm... but we rent our apartment... that would be a problem. When it comes time to moving from this apartment, Veronica would be doing the moving, and I would be removing the nails for a week! Not so cool. So I thought about hanging a board of sorts and doing the nails in that. So I decided to us Foam sheets (inexpensive) and black push-pins (also inexpensive). Lightweight, cheap, and readily available.

I wanted to maintain a look, that the image was done right on the wall. As a pointillism drawing is pencil or ink dots on white paper, I wanted to keep the monotone look and have the black pin-heads on the yellow wall. So I painted two 4X8 sheets of foam the same yellow paint as the walls, mounted the sheets together, and then touched up the seams and mounting screws with paint.

So I wanted the image to be something scenic, I was thinking something outdoors and nature related as we don't get much of a view of the outdoors from in here. The Common Loon has always been one of my favourite creatures on earth. Since Veronica doesn't seem to have any sort of fears of loons, I didn't think she'd mind a rather large representation of a loon in our place! So I projected a sketched image of a loon onto the wall using an LCD projector hooked up to my laptop, poured my bulk order of black push-pins into our large salad bowl, and well, less than 20 hours later I wound up with this.

Any guesses as to how many pins?? Really, I'd like to see what your guesses will be!

The winner gets this artwork when Veronica gets sick of it... :) :)

Click on the images for a closer look!