Containers made of Paper

Paper Containers

How many of you have seen this video:

I watched it.  At the same time I was trying to think of something my daughter and I could do together for our Thursday art project.

I've got considerable experience in photo printing and photo mounting and this video caught my interest.  It looked good enough that I went ahead and bought the whole package of containers.  This is my report....

Here is the link to the place I got them from: http://www.shippingcontainermodels.com/

First, let me show you how some of mine turned out:

Pretty cool actually.  What I have to say about these containers is that, while they won't likely be carried on my well cars, they will help me make a massive container facility.  They cost next to nothing to make.  Once you pay your $27 for a set of pdf's, you can make as many as you want as often as you want.

It's as easy as they show in the video.  After making about my 3rd container, I got it down to making several at a time.  I'm going to do an experiment in a couple days where I see how many I can make while watching a movie.

Here are some tips I have for an improved method of making these containers:

1.  They look fine on plain paper, use regular paper for most of your work.  Using high quality presentation paper makes them more vivid and is better for the most prominent containers that you might photograph or scenes where only a couple containers are present.

2.  Use regular Elmer's Glue All (plain white glue) instead of super glue, it has working time that super glue doesn't.  Also, the first couple I made got a ton of super glue on my fingers.

3.  Use card stock instead of cereal boxes.  It's easier to get and you don't have to raid all your cereal boxes.

4.  Use Elmer's spray adhesive (or for 3x as much money use 3M Photo Mount) to attach the paper to the card stock.

5.  Don't worry if the paper and card stock don't line up because you're cutting it up anyways.

6.  A heavy roller used for countertops and laminates works the best for smoothing the paper and card stock after you use spray adhesive.

7.  Use a rotary cutter if you have it to do the rough trimming, if you don't, then use a decent box cutter and steel ruler for the cuts where you cut material away.  I wrecked 3 different types of rulers before getting out the steel ruler.  The wood ruler with the metal strip is now the wood ruler that formerly had a metal strip.

8.  For the scoring, an xacto #17 blade and a machinists ruler works great.

I'm making some more so I'll continue to update on this project.....