traditional korean paper art

One of the cooler (i think) things that i've been doing while in Korea is working with traditional paper art. when i first saw the results at my school festival a few months ago i thought it would be very hard, so i started out with something easy. i ordered my first kit - i got two actually, a tray and a box. i was practicing for the real deal... a beautiful red box, complete with drawers, which i made over the holidays...

it is meant to be easy, but sometimes you can run into trouble...like when all the instructions are in korean and you don't have a korean handy to translate for you... but, nonetheless, i managed... here is how it's done:

open your kit and make sure you have everything. 1. cardboard peices that go together to make whatever object you are trying to make. 2. the paper to later cover everything in. 3. large brush to brush on glue and varnish. 4. "papier mache" glue. 5. varnish. 6. crazy glue. the only things that come in the kit are the paper products, everything else was bought separately.this is the part i messed up on... i didn't wait for the glue to coagulate properly and had to re-paper these peices a couple of times over... in the process forcing the cardboard to bend itself in weird ways... i should have waited, at any rate, until after the next step was completed...

as you can see in this picture, the pretty paper is not sticking to the cardboard like it is supposed to... oops.

take all your bits of cardboard and crazy glue them into the correct shape. in this case one of the drawers.

see? the crazy glue... beleive me, it's worse than crazy glue... i got some on my finger and it didn't come off for days despite the repeated scrubbing and picking at it. probably could have used turpentine, but i didn't have any handy!
Then you use your "papier mache" glue to stick the pretty paper to the boring old cardboard.

this is one of the longer parts, since you have to cover everything in the pretty paper, and figuring out which bit of paper goes where takes a while... i had a few peices that just didn't fit properly and so, had to use my smarts to figure it out... it all turned out in the end. as you can see.

then you cover the whole thing in three coats of varnish - this is also a long process, but mostly because it has to dry before re-applying. isn't it pretty?

here's a better view. yes, real metal for the handles... comes included in the kit.

and a close up of the decal on the top and two sides. i'm still not sure what to do with the box... i don't even have a surface to put it on in my apartment - right now it's on a chair - but i do love it... it's a nice relaxing hobby, and i can see myself making a bunch more fun things like this before i leave. here are shots of my first two attempts:

the tray
the box -

of which i was ashamed because i made the lid upside down... but doesn't that just give it character? make it unique, like me? i think so, and i like it very much...