Egg Box Insects

Breaking down egg boxes into their component parts is a great way of ‘playing’ with shapes and works well with many natural forms, birds, plants, or maybe insects like these . . .

Cutting an egg box up into ‘available’ shapes.

Egg Box Wasp

Egg box dragonfly

You can even use the leftover pieces of the egg box to make a simple background, maybe some foliage like this. Here I’ve tried to use up every single piece I had left over, what I call ‘pure making’.

Or, taking things in a different direction you could also look at other insects, or insects used as motifs, like this Ancient Egyptian Scarab Beetle.

Here’s an early stage, choosing what works best as for each part of the design.

This finished Scarab shows you the level you can take this kind of sculptural work. Its success is mainly due to the ‘choice’ of the different elements, the actual construction is pretty easy. I’ve used glue here and just used tape temporarily to keep pieces in position, then removed this once it was dry.

. . . and here’s an even more complex design based a Hawk Moth. I built this up from the base, making the underside of the body first and then using curved sections of the egg box to gradually build up the body shape.

You can see some of the stages below . . .

This technique offers a beautiful way to capture the angular structure of insects body’s whilst at the same time capturing their fragility. I honestly think it’s a method you could use to explore almost any insect, and with any age-group, from the simplest ‘3-piece’ insects with Reception classes, right up to incredibly complex, anatomically correct studies created with older students.