Transformers String Art

07/12/2014

I was inspired by this cool string project I found while browsing reddit. I decided to make my own version, but decided to use two colors of nails and two colors of strings. I thought the Autobot and Decepticon logos were perfect for this because one is a light color on dark while the other is the inverse. I used 1″ black nails, 1.25″ silver nails, black yarn, silver yarn, and the base is a piece of a bookshelf (26″ x 17.5″) I got for free off of craigslist. The materials for this project cost me about $10 in total, and about 10 hours of labor. Although not all the nails were straight and some of my knots were kinda sloppy, overall I’m pretty happy with how everything turned out.

I thought I took more pictures of the work in progress, but I guess once I started stringing I just got in a groove and kept going. It would also be difficult to keep the string in tension while trying to hold the camera. I had a few incidents where the yarn would slip off the nail I had just placed it, lose tension and then would fall off 3-4 of the nails strung right before it as well… the rework was not a lot of fun.

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Here’s how I made it:

I started off by drawing the nail templates, coloring in the area which was to be filled with black.
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Once I placed the templates on the piece of wood, I immediately saw that they were going to be too small.
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Here, I redid the templates and aligned everything up again. It actually ended up being really useful to have two copies of the drawings, since it got really hard to see the template once I started stringing.
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The templates are marked with hole locations (x’s for background nails, o’s for taller foreground nails) taped and ready to go.
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I started putting the nails down and used some scrap wood to help guide their height.
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The outlines are done for both and ready to be strung.
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Autobot logo in progress… placing string between nails that were really close together was a huge pain.
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Finished Autobot logo.
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Here are both logos finished, I have started to remove the template paper from beneath as well. This turned out to be the single most time consuming part of the project… like 3+ hours >.<;; I ended up using two different sized flathead screwdrivers to rip the paper up and tweezers to pluck the little bits out. transformerStringArt-09

Finished!
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Here’s a closeup picture of the layers.
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