Hello there my name is Roger Healey Dilks and today I'm going to show
you how to make your own recycled coaster project.
So what I have in front of me are some coasters that I've made through collage.
They fit together as a little group and then they separate so they'll all be separate
little coasters. So the idea behind the recycled uh coaster project is to use up all that waste
stuff you have at home. We live in a world where there is just so much waste so this is reclaiming
the cardboard the plastic bags for you to make something useful at home. It's simple,
it's fun and it's with just really low-tech materials you can use. So the idea of collage has
been with us for well over a hundred odd years, artists that you might like to look at are Robert
Rauschenberg and the German artist Hannah Hoch who both pioneered the idea of collage and using
mixed media in their work. I'm an artist as well and these works are based on some of the work I do
where I use things from my recycling bin I use building materials that I find and my work is all
about recycling and reusing and finding new things to do with the materials that you find at home.
So the materials you'll need for this project first you're going to find yourself some of
these are just blank like coasters they're made from MDF you can get these at popular craft stores
or you could maybe make some yourself. You will also need stuff to collage onto so I've just found
bits of packaging so go through your recycling bin at home find your fish finger wrappers if you eat
those, find your cereals find those posh biscuit wrappers, find the vegetarian option if you wish.
Okay so we need them going to cut those up. You will also need some form of glue so this glue here
has got a strength to it, a high bond to it, so get some really good strong this is PVA glue.
Also, you will need to varnish it as well so this is an acrylic varnish that dries really quickly
and also doesn't pong so much. You might also like to get some acrylic paint. So this is just
like tester pots of household paint that you might be able to find have a look on the reduced shelf
you've also need some scissors i would get yourself a marker pen also we'll need some
masking tape that's really important a craft knife a ruler a cutting mat so you don't cut through
your kitchen table and maybe some brightly colored tape you can use all sorts of things
and also we'll need some brushes so get yourself some different types of brushes
okay so the first thing to do is to bring together if you've got i'm going to use four tiles in this
one match all the edges up maybe use a ruler so it's nice and straight and then i want you
to get some masking tape and i want you to just stick them together so that they form a unit.
And then we're going to flip that over and just check that
they're all together and then we're going to just put that to the side.
so we're going to look at how our packaging is put together so find where the seam is
and then we're going to pull it apart and lay it out nice and flat let's get a couple of things so
we've got some blues we've got some darks this one we've got this really lovely orange
and green so think about how those colors are going to go together then we're going
to start to cut them up and put together i'm going to use the way that i work with my work
which is to make them into angles so get yourself a cutting mat get yourself a ruler if you're using
a knife please keep your fingers away from the blade and we're just going to make simple cuts
through the packaging really where there are the folds so when you've cut out some sections of the
packaging just have a look see how they fit for scale with your wooden board and then i'm going to
square them up a bit and cut diagonally across them so what i'm looking to do is create a pattern
across my tiles then i'm looking where the spaces are what might call the negative spaces and i'm
going to try and see if i can put something in to them so i'm going to take this other color
if i've got that then i can take a pen and i can just ruler some lines so i know where to cut
now we're starting to build up this tile i can start to look at how i want to arrange
the elements maybe flip things around and you're just trying to fill up that surface
and hopefully we will have filled up our square so there we go that's just the basic starting point
so take the sections flip them over and then get yourself some masking tape
and i want you to go down but the edges up to each other so it's nice and flat
and then i want you to use the masking tape just so that they sit perfectly
flush together and just place it back on your car so you know where it is just make sure
we're all stuck down marry them up again have a look check if you like your design we're going to
use the glue so this is kind of like a contact glue it dries off a bit and then you push it
together so first of all get yourself a brush get yourself some of the glue and then just put it on
both surfaces and then we're going to brush it out so that it covers every bit of it and again
i want to smooth it all over so we get the maximum amount of contact and what we're going to do is
just going to let that dry for a few minutes maybe 10 or so minutes and then we'll put it together
okay so we've applied the glue to the surfaces we've let it dry for a little bit just get a
little bit tacky then we are going to place it on this surface what we could also do now
is put some extra things onto it so we've got some tape here so what we could do it might be fun to
use so these are going to be more other decorative elements on it i've got some yellow that might go
well with this yellow i've got here just use the color think about kind of balancing it think about
ways that it would looks interesting as a whole then you could add some paint to it as well if
you wanted to and what i tend to do in my practice as a painter and i tend to mask off areas that i
want to paint so that i want to use i'm going to get a paintbrush now and then it's going to paint
into this bit this might be good also if you've got some gaps you can fill over so let me take it
off and then you're just going to let it dry for a bit
got our design we've got it's all still stuck together we're just going to wait for it to dry
so this now has dried so we can have a look at it think about any other things we want to do with it
you could draw onto it now so i've got a marker pen here you might want to add some different
layers of decoration onto it now we're going to turn it over and we're going to take off
these bits of tape because we want to now cut the individual tiles okay so get yourself a ruler get
yourself a blade push the blade out a little bit further than you would normally and just gently
go down the middle of those so that then should come apart now we're going to cut off the excess
on each one so let's just take the blade down the side of the tile this one's got a slightly rounded
corner so i'm just going to go across those corners as well and there we've got one of our
coasters and there we go so they should all now fit back together and now they're ready to varnish
i've got some sort of acrylic uh craft varnish just check your varnish is good
for heat um because you might want to put a hot drink on top of this
um and then just stick a bit into a cup get yourself a big flat brush
and then we're just going to coat them to seal the surface protect it make it a bit waterproof
and give it a little bit of a sheen as well so this is quite a glossy one i hope you've enjoyed
making or learning how to make your collaged uh recycled coasters today if you are going to make
some and you want to share them with us we'd love to see what you've made so tag us on social media