Cubic Art Replica

I picked up a bundle of 5 mm (3/16") thick foamcore that was being disposed of from my work, and it sat in my garage forgotten for a few years. Earlier this summer I was cleaning out my garage and in addition to the foamcore I also had a LOT of cans of half-empty spraypaint. I decided some artwork was in order so I looked through the catalogue of one of my favorite artists, Sol Lewitt. He was a conceptual artist famous for his bold geometric designs, and I had reproduced one of his pieces in the past. His work is unusually well suited to duplication thanks to being designed to be executed by others following simple rules. I liked the looks of the painted cubes made from one of his designs for the Olympic Sculpture Park, and decided to spray paint them on the foamcore.

To make this as I did, you need 5 mm (3/16") foamcore (7 pieces), spraypaint, acrylic gouache paint, a cutter (I used a laser cutter but an exacto knife and a straightedge would work fine), packing tape and mounting strips.

I trimmed my sheets of foamcore down using an exacto knife to 800 x 505 mm (the size of the Speedy360 laser cutter bed). I designed the cube using the sketch function in Fusion, and included a border for each cube. It would be easy enough to cut all of these with an exacto knife, but because the laser cutter is fast and super precise I used that instead (note that it does melt the interior polystyrene away from the cut line, so keep cutting speeds high). The dxf file is attached, it should be able to be imported into whatever drawing program you like, and sized to suit you. You can access the Fusion file also. For each cube you end up with 5 pieces - a border, a cube surround, a diamond-shaped top piece and two parallelogram side pieces.

Foamcore will warp badly if you use water based paints on it, but spray paint is fine. I had about 20 cans of old spray paint; 7 of them were blocked up or nearly empty. I had 6 of the necessary colors and had to buy some purple. I set the borders to one side and painted the other 4 pieces preassembled. Lots of light coats a minute or so apart worked well. I used a mix of brands of spray paints, since they were leftovers, but they were all just inexpensive big box store options. Some were getting close to empty, the yellow one in particular was spluttering a lot (see second picture), but I actually liked the texture of this more than the others (see next step).

I put the pieces together but was disappointed with the look; the color was very flat and shiny and didn't have the nice texture of the Olympic Park piece. I found a barely used paint set in our craft room of Japanese style gouache paint, and used that to build texture. I mixture a color close-ish to the spray paint color, then used the rounded end of a foam roller to daub the paint on the cubes (I reassembled them as one color for this step). You want to dab it on almost dry to retain the texture of the foam. Here are the mixes I used:

1. Red: 3 parts deep red + 1 part Red Brown
2. Orange: 3 parts yellow red + 1 part pale yellow
3. Yellow: 3 parts pale yellow + 1 part beige
4. Green: 1 part yellow green + 1 part pale green
5. Blue: 2 parts pale blue + 1 part dark blue
6. Purple: 6 parts deep pink + 1 part dark blue + tiny bit of deep red
7. Grey: 4 parts white + 1 part black blue + 1 part red brown

You don't need much - these were 20 ml tubes, I maybe used 2-4 ml for each cube (and you can see in the trays I often had a lot left over).

I assembled the cubes following only the rules that (1) the same color should not appear twice in the same cube and (2) pairs of the same color should only appear together twice (in hindsight, I should have just copied the original!). I flipped them over and secured them in place using packing tape on every join.

I used 3M Command strips to attach them to the wall. Each cube is very light so these worked really well. Stand back and admire your new artwork! Sure to liven up any space; mine hang high in my office at work.