Today’s featured DIY reminds me of the Action Figures Lamp by Jessy Rafting. The design you’re seeing here is also about toys, although it’s totally different. Who doesn’t know those plastic soldiers that kids play with or used to play with. Don’t even know if kids play with them anymore. But grownups building miniature battle fields use them for sure. And like lots of these toy figures or soldiers, they can be found at garage sales and thrift shops waiting to get upcycled to a new life and function. And what better function than to change a symbol of war into a peaceful good looking object for an interior.
Fruit bowl shows army figures being upgraded
If you’re not familiar with the inspiring website Instructables, you should definitely visit it once in a while. There’re so many interesting things to see and so many DIY‘s to be found. And this is where I stumbled upon this design called Plastic Army Men Fruit Bowl by Mike Pinder.
He’s a design and innovation researcher who’s drawn to finding out how and why things work, visually and mechanically. Mike once saw a similar project a while ago and decided to make his very own Plastic Army Man Fruit Bowl. Which resulted in an intriguing, fun and good looking upcycle design piece. In a way it’s showing these army figures being upgraded.
Mike Pinder [source Boredpanda]:
“I try to create artwork that subverts popular cultural meaning and challenges the viewer to re-assess their own understanding of the signs and symbols from high and low art forms that make up our every day visual experiences. In this instance I took a contrasting, highly-loaded political symbol (soldiers for children made from oil) in low art form as cheap toys and subverted their meaning into a high-art decorative form, as an every day functional object – a delicate organic fruit bowl.”
Photos © Mike Pinder
Seeing this bowl makes me want to go to a thrift store to look for a box of plastic figures or animals. I don’t know about you, but reading the detailed DIY tutorial is inspiring enough to give it a try. If you’ve got some figures lying around you should definitely try it yourself. So check out the great tutorial.
One more thing, if you have another metal or glass container you could also create any other shape.
Created by Mike Pinder | DIY tutorial
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