Altered Mint Tins

I've been teaching an Altered Mint Tin workshop at Shake Rag Alley for the last couple of years. I'd sold all of my altered tins, so when I had another class coming up in November I needed to make a class sample. But this time I took a slightly different approach than I had in the past. Instead of thinking of the tin as a decorated container, I viewed it as sort of a substrate for creating art. Sure, these are basically embellished tins that do open and could function as containers, but I wanted to create objects that could stand on their own as interesting artful pieces aside from any potential utilitarian purpose. Hope I succeeded, but regardless, I had so much fun making the first one that now I'm totally hooked.

Here are a few samples of what I've come up with. I really like putting feet on the boxes and search my stash of junk for anything I can find that will serve the purpose from chess pieces to plastic plumbing fixtures (I transform plastic pieces into faux metal with acrylic paint and metallic rub-ons  - one of my favorite craft materials). The tins are covered with a combination of commercial papers and fabric papers that I make myself. I sometimes decoupage the entire lid, but I prefer to take advantage of the color of the tin and only cover the lid's flat portion letting the original color on the edge of the lid be part of the design. My design mantra for the top is "layer, layer, layer" using anything and everything at hand.