john t. unger studio

Bottle Cap Art Tutorial: How I Craft my Bottle Cap Mosaics

Every few weeks I get an email asking me about how my Bottle Cap Mosaics are created… people want to know what they're made of, how the caps are attached, where I get the caps for the mosaics and so on. I've created the video below to answer most of those questions.

Probably the most frequent question is "do you drink all that beer yourself?" Well, no. If I did, I'd never get anything done so I hire professionals (ie: I get most of them from bars and quite a few from friends who save them for me).

Mosaic Commission for LimeLight Lodge, Aspen Colorado

I just finished up seven mosaic trout for the swimming pool at the LimeLight Lodge in Aspen, Colorado. They came out great. Most of the glass is Sicis Iridium, the same iridescent glass I used for the Alden Bank sign a few years back. I love using it for fish mosaics because it makes them shimmer as the light shifts just like a real fish. What excites me about this project is that the mosaics will be installed on the bottom of a swimming pool… so I think the light will do really interesting things as it goes through the water.

Below is a slideshow of the mosaics pulled from my Flickr account. I've posted print quality images to flickr if you'd like to see these mosaics in greater detail.

Commissioned Bottle Cap Fish Mosaic

This is a recent bottle cap fish I did as a commissioned housewarming gift. It's my favorite that I've ever done. I love the way that the mixed caps work to create a richer color tone. To see a larger, print quality image just click the picture below.

For this fish, I worked from a photo sent by the client. The goal was to match the brown trout caught by her husband as closely as possible. I haven't really tried being that representational with the bottle cap work before, but I'm really pleased with the results so I think I'll do more like this.

Bottlecap Mosaics on Etsy

I added a bunch of new things to my store at Etsy over the holiday weekend. Most of them are things you can buy on the blog here, but some are on Etsy only. The three bottlecap fish mosaics below are the last I have in stock at this time… I don't know when or if I'll be making more of them (probably, and for sure if you commission one, but you can never really tell).

Click the image below to go to the page where you can buy the mosaic.

 

Firebowls and Art in this month's issue of Tattoos for Men

I just got a copy of this month's issue of Tattoos for Men with an awesome four page spread devoted to an article and photos of my art. Dang. This is one of the nicest features I've had anywhere yet! I guess I might have guessed it was gonna be pretty sweet when I read the email from Joy Surles asking me for an interview. She wrote:

Oooh! Your stuff is awesome! I'm doing that dance like I used to do in the toy store with my mother...that up and down, hardly able to breathe, make-my-mama-slap-me dance! Our readers will love your stuff!

Especially that crazy devil windvane!

I love it when people talk to me like that! Click the thumbnails below to see full-size, readable pages from the magazine.

Designed for Permanence: John T. Unger's Lasting Creations Tattoos for Men Nov. 2007: 32-35.

I had thought that the feature was going to be an interview, but it turns out to be an article based on responses to questions Joy sent me. I've reproduced the Q&A from our email in the extended post in case anyone's curious.

A Nice Catch: Not your everyday fishing photo!

 

Drew Klonsky is pretty dang cool. For one thing, his sign-off on emails is /drew ( I wish I'd thought of that!) For another thing, he takes great photos like the one above. Drew was among the early buyers of the Great Bowl O' Fire and later he commissioned a recreation of my Corona Coho Corona Coho Salmon Bottle Cap Mosaic. A couple weeks ago, I got an email from Drew:
 

Wondering if you can create this guy again in the next month.  If you recall you made me a Corona Coho and also a totally cool fire pit that rocks. This is for my father in law who had another great fish we bought for his birthday stolen from his house.

 

I let him know that the fish would be a little different than the original, in part because some of the brands used for the original fish are uncommon, and in part because I've stopped using the corrugated tin can metal on the fins. There only seems to be one brand of coffee that comes in a fully-corrugated can, and I haven't come by any of them lately. Drew signed off on the changes, I made the fish, and the birthday gift was quite the hit.

Anyway, I love the photo! And I was really happy to get to use the Jolt Cola cap I've been saving since my trip to Austin for the eye. The big "X" on the cap just cracks me up and I wish I could find some place around here that sells the big cans of jolt that it comes on. If there's any highly caffeinated people out there who'd like to save me some jolt caps and mail them to me, I'd be glad to pay the postage for them!

Johnny Evers Mosaic, Centerpiece of the Chicago Cubs Triptych

Johnny Evers Mosaic: Chicago Cubs Triptych
Johnny Evers Mosaic Portrait, 2006 vitreous glass mosaic, steel frame. 48" H x 60" W x 1.5" D Commission
It's nearly impossible to reduce a six foot wide mosaic to a 600 pixel wide image and get it to look the way it should! The grout lines tend to create a moiré distortion that obscures the detail. Click on the image above to see a larger (1863 wide x 1223) version. You might prefer to download it to your computer and view it in an image viewer that gives you more control than the browser. Below are a few pictures from the installation of the piece. The first is Tony Racky admiring his new mosaic. You can see from the photo that the mosaic is pretty much life-size. The next two pics show the mosaic on the wall of the BaseBall Club with Tony and Gil to give a sense of scale.
click thumbnails to view larger image.

 

Installing a 4 x 6 foot mosaic panel 50 feet in the air on a cold and windy Chicago day is no real picnic!

I'm not sure how much this piece weighs, but I'd guess that it's around 250 pounds. No matter how heavy a piece like this is, it will act like a sail when you have a stiff Chicago wind. We were lucky enough to have the railing right above where we wanted to hang it, so we used ropes to haul it up and tied it off. Then I climbed to the top of the best ladder on site and basically used the wind to hold me in place while I held the mosaic in place and reached to the limits of my ability to drill the first two holes for the concrete anchors. It's hard to drill over your head to begin with, but try it with a 24V hammer drill! Yikes.

Fortunately, everything went pretty well and we were able to install the mosaic without injury to art or person. The installation was done on my way back from SXSW and since these things always take longer than expected, I had to hit the road before the two smaller panels were hung. Next time I'm in Chicago, I'll try to swing by and get a photo of the entire set in place.

 

Tinker to Evers to Chance: A Tribute to the Chicago Cubs

The image above shows the completed triptych. View a larger image of the Joe Tinker Mosaic here. View a larger image of the Frank Chance Mosaic here. The images below show the baseball cards that the mosaics were based on (circa 1910-11 found at the Library of Congress' Special Collections website). They all shared the orange sky, but since the project was done in stages over a period of a few years, I thought I would give the smaller ones blue skies to avoid confusing people. On the final piece I went with the orange, which I really like. The contrast between the blue and orange works really well, I think.

click thumbnail to view larger image.

Recent Interviews

Liz Hinks at Great Green Goods just posted her first podcast, a rambling conversation we had on the topic of making art from recycled materials, how I got my start in art and various other topics. Really, she described it better: “John T. Unger, the creator of the famous ”Great Bowl O Fire“ talks about how working with recycled materials has brought him love, fame and happiness!!”

It was a blast getting a chance to chat with Liz, who is one of my favorite bloggers and a long time friend.

I also have a couple brief cameo appearances in an interview with Hugh MacLeod on Tony Piece's LAist blog shot at SXSWi. It's pretty much a smile and wave sort of thing, but we had a great time hanging out drinking Makers and if I owned a scanner, I'd post a picture of the cartoon Hugh drew for me. Man, I've wanted my own gapingvoid cartoon since about when I started blogging.

Ben, over at the MoneySmartLife blog interviewed me way back in February. I should have posted the links then, but it's been crazy busy for months. Ben asked some really great questions and is looking for other entrepreneurs who would like to speak about their experience.

The interview is divided into three parts:

1. Entrepreneur Extraordinaire. Learn from this Artist, Designer, and Catablogger.
2. Entrepreneurial Journey, Motivation, & Enthusiasm.
3. Catablogging & Health Care Coverage

It's fun to get a chance to answer other people's questions and refine some of my ideas.

I should probably have been a lesson in the chapter on probabilities…

One of my bottle cap mosaics is going to be featured in an upcoming book, but it's not about art, mosaic or even drinking… this is a math textbook from Houghton Mifflin. Further proof that irony is the organizing principle of the universe! If you click on the image it will expand large enough to actually read the text.

The story problem reads: "Camila and Nicholas use bottle caps to make pictures. They share 47 bottle caps equally. How many caps do they each get? How many are left over?"

Camila and Nicholas are going to need to go on a serious soda binge if they want to make their own fish!

Technorati Tags: art, bottle cap, bottlecap, crown cap, fish, folkart, mosaic, outsider art

Anatomy Chart Mosaic in Marble

I finished the marble mosaic for Tommy Jenkins last week and brought it down to Chicago on this trip. Tommy does massage therapy and just opened up his own space recently. If you're in the Chicago area and looking for a total genius to work on your back, I recommend calling Tommy, stat. Email me for his cell phone number.

The mosaic is based on an anatomical drawing by Bartolomeo Eustachi, Italian anatomist, born ca. 1500-1513, San Severino, Ancona; died August 27, 1574. The dimensions are approximately 3 x 2 feet. There are links to the original art, as well as a whole library of antiquarian anatomy drawings on my previous post about this project.

 

 

Here's a detail image of the hand, which is definitely my favorite part… The tendons came out amazingly well.

 

 

It's a bit hard to make out the colors properly in these photos, but hopefully I'll get an opportunity to take better ones in the future.