Turtle’s Treasure
24 May 2010
This is my Turtles box. My uncle gave it to me (unfortunately, without the Chocolate Turtles inside) many, many years ago and it has been the home of my magazine clippings ever since. But these aren’t the usual clippings. You won’t find any meaningful articles here. What I do is cut out words or phrases and pictures or graphics that I like and keep them here.
What do I do with all this junk, you ask? At first I didn’t know, I just liked collecting stuff, and these clippings have often funny, witty, or unusual words and phrases. Some are small illustrations that I just like. Most of these are from advertisements and article titles in old Fortune magazines. I even had a phase when I would buy old magazines from book sales just for this purpose. Some are cool-designed tags of clothes and other products. Some are packaging (see that Starbucks Tazo Mint wrapper?) and wrappers from Japanese sweets.
I think the first thing I ever made out of these clippings was this conceptual art piece in my deviantArt gallery made way back in 2004:
This blue box was the original home of my clippings, back when the collection was small. I found this “REALITY CHECK” phrase and the idea just popped in my head.
My next victims were my notebooks in college. In this particular one, I just took letters of interesting typefaces and spelled out quotes that I like a-la ransom note. I love that picture with the “THINK” encircled in red.
The next ones were the inside covers of another college notebook. Very obvious because it had “architects” (my degree) and “2001” (the year I started college) on them. Here I started placing more graphics. Almost everything I stick on there have some underlying meaning about what I am and what I want to be. Some are just puns and fun stuff (e.g. the figure blowing wind at the building; and “I like lying down on the couch in front of the TV and leaving my brain elsewhere.”). Who would’ve thought that I’d find all these cool stuff in a magazine about entrepreneurs and finance?
This next one is also posted in deviantArt. It’s a freebie notebook I got from a box of Dove products. I added some stickers (which I also collect), and you can see that there are more graphics than words this time, but they all still tell something about myself or what I want. It’s my way of personalizing.
My latest collage project was my signature sheet for a college org. The front is what I think about the course (Interior design) while the back cover is a little more stuff about myself.
What do you think? I’m quite proud of what I do, and I’m happy that I get to use the stuff I’ve been collecting in a fun and quirky way. I’m also recycling stuff that would otherwise be thrown out or left to gather dust in shelves without being read. I hope to make more things like this, maybe not limited to notebooks. I’m not encouraging people to be a packrat like me, but if you have the luxury of space and the same “mental illness” as I do, and as long as you use what you keep, then by all means go cut up those old magazines and make your world a little more colorful!
ang craftista 
ganda! nainggit ako. u have time to do this pa. 🙂 pero i lke the idea of collecting photos from mags muna. i can do that. though i dnt think i have time to make a decoupage pa. galing!!!!
haha naku, sa arki pa ako nakagawa ng ganyan. Ngayon wala na rin akong oras. Di na rin ako nakakapag-gupit ng mags. I hope to do more, though. 🙂 Thanks
I love the idea of a clipping box. I should start one of my own.
^_^ GO! It’s best if you get to use your clippings instead of just keeping them in the box 🙂
I also have a whole box of scrapbook material, but I never get around–read: too lazy–to actually putting them together into a scrapbook. Or scrap cover. Or ANYTHING, actually. I need your mad artistic skillz. Whenever I try to “artistically” throw things together, they most usually end up looking awkward 😦
hmm. Most of the stuff I make is just throwing things together, and most of the time I see them as awkward, but I get lazy and stop working on it. In time it just grows on me, I guess.
I suppose the best thing to do is don’t try so hard to make it “artistic”, “perfect”, or “finished”. Nakaka-pressure yun eh. :p
[…] is the fun stuff. I pore through the contents of my clippings box and found some words and images that fit the bill of a wedding message, albeit offbeat. I wanted […]