The original plan for this piece was just to do a simple bear head for our living room wall, nothing fancy. But as sometimes happens with my ideas, this one evolved over time and I honestly don’t know where or how the rest of it came from, all I can say is that it popped into my head and I knew I had to do it because it would be amazing! The entire head is hollow. I painted the inside bright red and put some red LEDs in there, then cut out the claw marks on the right side. On the inside of the flat backing, I glued a collage of news articles describing horrific black bear attacks, and if you look in through the claw marks you can see them. The last step was covering the outside in fur, which was a whole lot messier than I had anticipated, but once it was secured I was able to vacuum up all the stray bear hairs and now it’s fine. It’s also easy to dust since I can just use the vacuum on him!
The Starr Star
This star was one of my first large-scale paper mache projects, and it’s one of my favorite pieces. It’s about 6 feet in diameter but since it’s hollow, it’s pretty lightweight. I made the star shape out of cardboard and hot glue, then paper mached the whole thing. But the most fun part of this star is the paper that I used to finish it with. I had decided to just cover the outside with book pages, so I went to Goodwill to find an old book to use. But instead, I happened to find a copy of the Kenneth Starr report for $1.50, so it was a no-brainer; I mean what could be better to cover a star with than the Starr report, right? If you are not familiar with Kenneth Starr and his famous report, Mr. Starr is an attorney who investigated the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal back in the day, and the report contains a detailed account of his findings. There are hand-written notes, calendar pages, letters, transcripts of interviews, and tons of other stuff. There’s even a photo of Bill and Monica together, which I included on the star.