Elephant No. 337: Three-Dimensional Corkboard

I bought a pair of cork tiles a few days ago, with no real idea how I'd use them to make an elephant, so today I thought I'd try to figure it out.

Cork comes from a tree called the Cork Oak (Quercus suber), which is native to northwestern Africa and southwestern Europe. Because it is impermeable and lightweight, it is used in many products, from wine stoppers to flotation devices.

Cork was first examined under a microscope by Robert Hooke during the seventeenth century. Interestingly, the divisions he saw in the material led to his discovery of what he called a "cell"—named for its resemblance to a monk's chamber.

Cork oak in Christchurch Botanic Gardens,
Christchurch, New Zealand.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cork_tree.jpg

Cork is harvested from early May to late August, when the cork can be separated from the tree without causing permanent damage. Cork is not harvested from a tree until the tree is at least 25 years old and at least 60 cm (24 inches) in diameter.

The first harvest always results in poor quality, or "male" cork. After this, each tree is harvested approximately every ten years, although it can take as many as 13 years for cork to reach an acceptable thickness. High-quality cork is known as "gentle" cork, and is used for making wine and champagne stoppers. A cork tree lives an average of 200 years.

Harvested cork oaks, Ubrique, Spain, 2008.
Photo: Wavering
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cork_Trees_Ubrique.jpg

There are currently about 2.2 million hectares (5.4 million acres) of cork forest in the world: 32.4% of which is in Portugal, and 22.2% of which is in Spain. Approximately 300,000 tonnes (330,000 tons) of cork is produced each year, 61.3% of which comes from Portugal. In 2011, the Portuguese cork industry alone was worth 806,000,000 Euros (approximately $1.1 billion U.S.).

Although there was some controversy a few years ago about the sustainability of cork production, cork is not only an environmentally friendly industry but also a highly sustainable one. Studies on the carbon footprint of the cork industry in a number of countries have determined that cork is, for example, far and away the most environmentally friendly form of wine stopper: a plastic stopper releases ten times more carbon dioxide, and an aluminum one releases a whopping 26 times more carbon dioxide.

The World Wildlife Federation has also launched a campaign to ensure the long-term survival of cork forests. When cork suddenly fell out of favour for wine stoppers, existing cork forests came under threat. And once cork forests are of no commercial value, they face either abandonment or conversion to other uses. This is a significant problem for species that are specific to cork forests, such as the critically endangered Iberian lynx, the Iberian imperial eagle, and the Barbary deer. As a result, the World Wildlife Federation is currently urging people to ensure that they buy wine and champagne with natural cork stoppers. For more on the importance of cork forests, please click here.

Cork is harvested by workers known as "extractors". Using a very sharp axe, they make two types of cut: a horizontal cut around the trunk at a height of about two or three times the tree's circumference, and several vertical cuts called "rulers" or "openings". Although the cuts require significant force, this is actually a rather delicate operation, because the extractor cannot damage the layer just beneath the commercial cork, or the tree will die.

Wine and champagne are the most lucrative cork products. The stoppers made for wine are often a single piece of cork, whereas the stoppers used in champagne are made of composite granules. Because of cork's spongy cellular structure, the material is easily compressed when inserted into a bottle, expanding to create a tight seal.

Natural cork wine stopper.
Photo: © 2007 David Monniaux
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cork_p1160013.jpg

The sheets of cork used in bulletin boards and tiles for walls and floors are a by-product of stopper production. Granules of cork can also be mixed into concrete. Cork is used as well for the joins in woodwind instruments such as the clarinet, for shoes, for the cores of baseballs and cricket balls, in heat shields on spacecraft, and even for a special-issue Portuguese postal stamp.

Portugal's stamp made of cork, issued December 26, 2007.
Made of cork measuring a mere 0.35 mm (0.13 inch) in thickness, it had
a face value of one Euro, and was issued in a limited edition of 230,000.
Source: http://michel.wermelinger.ws/postugal/cork-industry/

For today's elephant, I realized that the cork tiles I'd bought were actually rather thin, and that I would have to at least layer them if I were to use them in any way. My first idea was to make a couple of shapes with these, then stick them to an existing board. My other idea was to simply layer one of the tiles over top of the other.

I thought that the tiles had a peel-off backing, since most cork tiles do—and also because the uses listed on the label make it sound like they're peel-and-stick. Sadly, they weren't. This made life a bit more complicated, although not unduly so, since I had double-sided tape on hand.

In the end, I decided it would be interesting to make a small elephant corkboard, using one of the 30 x 30 cm (12 x 12-inch) tiles as a background, and cutting up the other to make a raised design. I've never seen a multi-layer corkboard, so I wasn't sure how well it would work out, but the tiles are cheap, so if it ended up a bust, it would be no great loss.

The hard part was figuring out what kind of design to make. The basic square is rather small, so the design would have to be somewhat minimal.

I sketched something out on paper first.

Because I didn't want one big mass for the design, I then retraced the design into a series of templates.

I traced around the templates onto one of the cork tiles, using a permanent marker.

Once I had all the shapes, I cut them out with a sharp craft knife. I tried cutting off one corner with a pair of sharp scissors, but scissors mangle the cork and cause it to fracture, so I used a craft knife and a self-healing cutting mat for everything. When everything was cut, I laid it out to see how it looked. Because there were marker lines on the original side, I flipped all the pieces over.

When everything was cut out, I placed double-sided tape in various strategic locations on the back of each piece.

I then assembled the whole thing.

To finish this, I'll need to get some kind of board or other backing, and a frame. Unfortunately, it's a holiday here today, so the shops aren't open. I may also switch from double-sided tape to glue, depending upon how well this holds together.

In the end, I was quite happy with my final design. I'm not sure how practical it will be, but it looks interesting, and might end up being a fun place to hang jewellery and the like.

Elephant Lore of the Day
Elephants are quick learners, as the following story attests.

Queenie was an Asian elephant at the Melbourne Zoo in Australia, during the first half of the twentieth century. A gentle and intelligent creature, Queenie gave children rides, ate gently from their hands, and performed various tricks. So popular was Queenie that people would line up for hours, just for a chance to interact with her.

Children would often taunt Queenie as well, holding out food that they would then snatch away from her. Often she would respond by taking them in her trunk and rolling them gently onto the ground.

One day, however, Queenie took a different tack. A group of about 15 schoolboys took turns teasing Queenie, each holding out a hand filled with nuts and fruit. As Queenie reached for the treats with her trunk, they would pull their hands away.

After a while, Queenie moved away and instead approached boys with no food. Holding out her trunk, as soon as they reached out to touch it, she would snatch her trunk away. The rest of boys—who had earlier teased Queenie—moved in more closely, each eager to play this new game with the clever elephant.

Queenie giving rides at the Melbourne Zoo, Royal Park, Melbourne, Australia, 1917.
Source: http://museumvictoria.com.au/collections/items/773798/negative-
queenie-the-indian-elephant-melbourne-zoo-royal-park-melbourne-victoria-1917

When all of the boys were within range, Queenie suddenly filled her trunk with the dirty water from her bathing pool and soaked all of the boys with one powerful and well-aimed spray.

Sadly, Queenie's story does not have a happy ending. Many years later, when Queenie had been at the zoo for 40 years, dutifully giving children rides, enduring teasing, and performing tricks, she had had enough. Although generally good-natured, one day in 1944 she trampled her keeper to death. He had been particularly cruel to Queenie just before she turned on him, beating her viciously behind the ears for disobedience.

The man tasked with shooting her was heartbroken. He had also been Queenie's keeper for a time, and declared her one of the loveliest animals with whom he had ever worked. He only agreed because he was the best shot in the zoo, and he wanted her end to be quick and painless. Queenie was 48 years old when she was euthanized.

Her story doesn't end there, however. So popular and iconic was Queenie, that she has since been immortalized in books, including the lovely Queenie: One Elephant's Story by Corinne Fenton, with illustrations by Peter Gouldthorpe.

Cover of Queenie: One Elephant's Story, 2006.
Source: http://www.walkerbooks.com.au/Books/QUEENIE-ONE-
ELEPHANTS-STORY-9781742032153?view=zoomCover

 

To Support Elephant Welfare

World Wildlife Fund

World Society for the Protection of Animals

Performing Animal Welfare Society

Zoocheck

Bring the Elephant Home

African Wildlife Foundation

Elephants Without Borders 

Save the Elephants

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand) 

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

Elephant Nature Park (Thailand)

Wildlife Trust of India

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)  
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee, U.S.A.)

Elephant No. 292: Push-Pin Art

I'd never thought of making a picture with push-pins, until I ran across some of the astonishing images people create. So I thought I'd try it for today's elephant.

The push-pin, with its large plastic head, is sometimes described as a "pin with a handle". It was invented in the early twentieth century by Edwin Moore, who started his company in 1900 with an investment of only $112.60. Each afternoon and evening, Moore would go to a room he had rented, where he devoted his time to making push-pins. And each morning, he would make the rounds of local businesses, selling what he had made the night before. His first sale was one gross (144) of push-pins for $2.00. His next large order was for $75.00 worth of of push-pins, and his first big deal was for $1,000, sold to the Eastman Kodak Company. 

Early advertisement for Moore's original push-pin.
Source: http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.ca/2011/08/you-push-it-in-with-your-fingers.html

Once he was well established, Moore began advertising. His first national advertisement appeared in the American magazine, The Ladies Home Journal, costing him a not-insignificant $168.00. His company continued to grow, and in 1904 was incorporated as the Moore Push-Pin Company. Over the next few years, Moore branched out, inventing and patenting many other similar items, including picture hooks and map tacks.

For 65 years, from 1912 to 1977, the Moore Push-Pin Company was located in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Today, the company is located in a suburb outside Philadelphia, where it still manufactures small items such as push-pins.

In addition to using push-pins as a way to attach paper to a bulletin board, artists are now using massive quantities of push-pins to make portraits and other detailed designs—sometimes as a group activity—as seen in the video below. To create portraits like this, a pre-printed grid of coloured dots—similar to what you'd see if looked at a magazine page through a magnifying glass—is often used as a guide.

For today's elephant, I bought a couple of multicoloured packs of push-pins, for about six dollars. This gave me a total of 600 push-pins, in two slightly different sizes, and five colours in slightly different shades: white, yellow, red, green and blue. I figured that I could probably make something vaguely realistic using these colours, since magazine images are usually composed of either cyan-magenta-yellow-black, or red-green-blue.

To try and imitate the realistic look of the push-pin portraits I like, I thought I'd work from a photograph. I chose the following photograph, which I've used before:

Asian elephant, Arnhem, Netherlands, 2010.
Photo: Foto Martien
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35110249@N05/page26/

I had a new bulletin board on hand—measuring 45 x 60 cm (18 x 24 inches)—so I pulled it out to use for this elephant. I had a sinking feeling that this might be a very time-consuming activity. I also wasn't sure 600 pins was going to do it.

I started out by placing "anchor" pins just to help outline the shape. I knew that I could move them later, and that I could also change the colours, so I didn't pay a lot of attention to colour and didn't agonize over the shape at this point. I also decided to use only half of the bulletin board, just in case.

This looked like a good enough base to start with, but I could already see that I was likely to run out of some colours, and end up with too many of others. I could also see that these bright primary colours weren't really going to allow for something terribly realistic, so I decided to insert the rest of the pins based on tonal value rather than colour, and just hope for the best.

 

At this point, it was beginning to remind me of an Australian Aboriginal dot painting, and I thought briefly about going for that look instead. Then I decided it would make more sense to just go with my first plan.

Now it was beginning to remind me of a heat map of an elephant. Surprisingly, I had actually ended up with some of the yellows, whites and reds in the right places for such a thing. But that wasn't my original idea, so I can't take credit for being that clever. And I still continued on with my original idea of using the tonal values of the pins to shade the elephant.

It took me about two hours to make the final elephant, but it wasn't particularly difficult. I didn't have to remove a lot of push-pins to place them elsewhere, and the only real casualty was my right thumb, which got rather sore from pushing nearly 600 pins into a somewhat unforgiving surface.

As you can see in the photograph below, I wasn't great about precise spacing, but I don't think it really mattered in the end.

I suppose this was a lot like creating a pointillist painting, but with push-pins rather than dots of paint. If I'd had more time, I probably would have painted something to use underneath to guide me. Or I might even have made a dotted diagram to use. And I might have bought more push-pins in better colours.

All that aside, I quite like the final elephant. I think the shape is rather nice, and the colours kind of work. Particularly if you squint.

Elephant Lore of the Day
White elephants are not actually white, but a pale grey or reddish brown. They have light eyelashes and toenails, and actually turn a sort of pink when wet.

For centuries, white elephants have been treasured in Burma, where their rare appearances are thought to herald good fortune and political change. And in June 2010—an election year in Burma—a white female elephant was captured by officials in the town of Maungtaw on Burma's western coast. She was thought to be about 38 years of age, and was apparently captured in the wild.

Because of the link between white elephants and political change, the elephant's capture was thought to be an important omen for elections scheduled later that year—Burma's first elections in two decades. Similar discoveries of white elephants in Burma in 2001 and 2002 had been viewed by opposition parties as bolstering support for their cause.

At the time of her capture, it wasn't known where the elephant would be housed. Hopefully she didn't end up in a tug-of-war between two opposing sides.

White female elephant discovered in western Burma in 2010.
Photo: www.myanmar.gov
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/burmamyanmar/7860447/
White-elephant-caught-in-Burma-is-omen-of-political-change.html

To Support Elephant Welfare

World Wildlife Fund

World Society for the Protection of Animals

Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information

on a number of sanctuaries around the world)

Performing Animal Welfare Society

Zoocheck

Bring the Elephant Home

African Wildlife Foundation

Elephants Without Borders 

Save the Elephants

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand) 

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

Elephant Nature Park (Thailand)

Wildlife Trust of India

Elephant No. 117: Rubber Band Sculpture

When I was in a stationery store recently, I noticed that they still sell balls made up of rubber bands, and it occurred to me that it might be worth trying to create an elephant with rubber bands. I had absolutely no idea if it would work without wires or something to help shape it, but I figured it was worth a try.

I won't go into the history of rubber again, since I covered it in my post about eraser printing. Rubber bands, however, seem to have originated in England around 1845, when they were patented by Stephen Perry. Rubber bands are made by extruding rubber into a long tube that provides the general shape. The tube is then placed on a metal form known as a mandrel and cured with heat. Once cured, it is sliced across the width of the tube into bands of varying width.

Interestingly, rubber bands release heat when they are stretched—an effect you can apparently feel by holding it to your lips. By the same token, when the rubber band is released, it will absorb heat, causing the atmosphere around it to cool.

For today's elephant, I used all the rubber bands I could find in the house, which amounted to this pile.

I didn't realize I had animal-shaped rubber bands when I threw this pile together, but when I looked at the pile, I discovered that there were two of these sitting right on top. I didn't use them in today's elephant, but it was funny to find them there.

I started by balling up a heavy rubber band into a small, round shape.

Next, I wrapped a bunch of smaller rubber bands around this basic form.

I kept wrapping rubber bands around the basic shape I'd started, then added a couple of wide rubber bands as legs, tying them off with tiny rubber bands wrapped around four times.

I secured this whole little bundle around its circumference with another rubber band. This, I decided, would be the elephant's hindquarters.

I made a similar bundle for the front. I wasn't sure at this point how the body was going to work, but I thought I could probably just bind them together with another rubber band.

Next, I made the head. I formed the ears by wrapping a long, wide rubber band around the bundle I'd made for the head shape, then tied it off on each side with tiny rubber bands.

I used a similar idea to form the trunk. Once the trunk was on the head, I secured it with a few more rubber bands.

To secure the head to the body, I ran a couple of rubber bands over the forehead and down behind the front legs, then wrapped a rubber band around the admittedly floppy join to form a stronger neck.

The photo below shows the general shape I now had to work with, although I could see that I was going to at least have to lengthen the legs somehow.

Lengthening the legs was by far the most frustrating and difficult part of this whole thing. I wrapped wide rubber bands around the little feet I had, but it was incredibly hard to make them stay. Eventually, with enough tiny rubber bands wrapped around, they stayed on, but there has to be a better was to do this.

From here on, I mostly just wrapped rubber bands around the whole thing in various ways to shape the elephant, make it secure, and make it look a little neater. I forgot to photograph the stages along the way, but you can see that I wrapped a lot of rubber bands around the body from front to back, and around the mid-section.

The finishing touches were a little tail I tucked up under the rubber bands on the elephant's hindquarters, and a bunch of tiny rubber bands down the trunk to give it some shape. I left the ears as they were—mostly because I didn't know what else to do with them in the time I had.

It's not the tidiest thing I've ever made, but it worked out better than I thought it would. It took longer than I expected, at about two hours, mostly because of the trouble I had with the leg extensions.

I'm definitely not going into the rubber band animal business anytime soon, but I can live with this. It's also got entertainment value, because the rubber is so densely packed that it has a heck of a bounce when it falls on the floor.

Elephant Lore of the Day
Elephants seem to have a predilection for running amok in rubber plantations. This is partly because they like the leaves of palm and rubber trees, but also because the plantations have encroached significantly on existing elephant habitat.

In recent years, there have been increasing numbers of lethal encounters between elephants and humans on plantations across South and Southeast Asia. This occasionally results in humans being trampled to death, although it is more common for the elephants to be destroyed. One of the saddest victims of this uneasy relationship has been the Sumatran elephant, which just this week was placed on the critically endangered list—largely because it is no longer welcome across its former range.

To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society
Zoocheck
Bring the Elephant Home
African Wildlife Foundation 

Elephants Without Borders