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Old Leaf

wrap art with autumn leaves

I love the dried leaves that carpet the autumn pathways. I began preparing for this wrap a while ago. And I added new leaves right up to the day I made this wrap. I have used large green leaves in the past. They can be shaped to the package. But what would allow me to use brittle dried leaves. I decided that I would try foam stilts to lift them free of the underlying wrapped box. I cut short pieces of white foam and hot-glued them onto individual leaves. When they cooled and were stable I trimmed the bottoms to make them stable and free-standing with three legs. Then I glued them onto the white-wrapped gift box. I added some that had only two legs, raising them higher that the initial batch of leaves so that the collage had a feeling of being airborne. Eventually there were enough to call it a finished composition.

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Two-piece with Twig Label

wrap art two piece with twig

I put the gift into a box and wrapped it some old bright white stationery. I then review my wrap-scraps drawer and found a magazine page with this lively grid of textures. I wrapped it around the now white box leaving the top quarter of the space open. I decided that dimension was called for, a helping of haptics for a happy birthday. I reached into the twig bin and came up with this shiny bit of aspen. I inscribed the greeting and glued it on. The two piece is a quick wrap strategy.

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Two Piece with Alphabeads

The two pieces of paper I used came from a large-format magazine with elegant advertisements. The smaller piece with the dot gradation ends in blank white, with an intriguing curve of remnant typography. I labeled the gift with alphabets, whose dimensionality gives the wrap a sculptural tease.

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Stripes

This is a classic two-piece wrap. I used a remaining piece of blue Pantone paper on the bottom. Then I reached for a packet of printed American flags that somehow made it into my paper drawer. I chose to use only the stripes, which still left the wrap with a strong hint of flag. I covered the join with a bit of skinny black ribbon. A mini label completes the task.

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Band Wrap Combines with Two-piece Wrap

jandr
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This is the second of Jacob and Rachel’s wraps. I began this wrap as a two-piece wrap. The gold-polka-dot paper had just arrived on a wrapped calendar. But it was to be the second layer of the two-piece technique. I chose the black shiny paper of shopping back as the foundation.

The bag had a white logotype printed on its sides. The vertical lines of its extremely condensed type suggested using the vertical lines of the band wrapping to cover up the logotype; if some of the white lines showed through they would become part of the band design.

First I made a temporary placement of the gold paper so I would know the angle of the edge where two pieces join. Then I wrapped the thick black paper onto the top half of the gift.

The bands went on next, thins strips with soft, puffy folds along their edges.  I left plenty of black paper to the left and right of the bands, which were now looking like a kind of “bow” in the evolving composition. I placed and fixed the gold polka-dot paper. At this point the bands became more of a flower arrangement sitting in the vase of gold paper.

The basic wrap was in place but the wrap was still not complete. I experimented with various kinds of ribbon, placing them in sympathy with the angles of the wrap, but crossing on top of all the wrapping components. As I analyzed the way the dimensional bands tucked into and under the round folded edge of the gold paper, it seemed a good idea to make the ribbon both cross over the two-piece border and also tuck under the bands, ironically enhancing the illusionistic space of this flat design by real dimensional means.

I was getting close to completion. I had wanted some gauze ribbon in the system. I took a red piece and glued it so that it tucked into the  two-piece border, and then ran down parallel to the black-and-white ribbon. I took one of my computer printed labels, cut it into a strip and placed in tuck-under style adjacent to the red gauze ribbon. Now the wrap was finished, a lively constructivist design with a very dimensional feel and plenty of reference to traditional wrapping’s luxury textures.