Introduction
For the transition of the class of 2026 from our Year 8 Tutor Groups to our House Tutor Groups, we held a transition ceremony, including the presentation of the Year group’s Project X (Visual Art, Media, Dance, Drama, Music) Performances. The festival with the presentation of Project X performances was called the “Illuminate Festival”. My chosen Project X subject was Visual Art, which presented stunning piñatas.
Inspiration
Our main inspiration for this project was Roberto Benavidez’s masterful piñatas. His work was influenced by Heironymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”.
Planning
My partner and my original idea was a hippocampus, a creature from Greek Mythology that is a mix of a horse and a fish. It has the body structure (sizing) of a horse, arm limbs like a horse besides the area where the hooves would have been which is fin. The mane is webbed (in our interpretation), they have no legs, and the tail is webbed. To make it more than just a fish-horse, we decided to add horns from a reindeer. For the colour scheme, we wanted to find quite contrasting colours that work together. This would make it stand out more next to other piñatas. We started with a silvery-white body, blue and yellow fins, and golden horns. We later progressed into adding golden streaks of colour in random positions to make it more interesting. In the future I think I would have added more colours as the silvery-white body overpowered the other colours as it was the majority of the piñata.
Creating the Piñata
To construct out Piñata, we had to go multiple steps. This included connecting both laser cut sides of our piñata together, gluing paper, painting, and gluing on lights and pom-poms.
Laser Cutting, Sticky Tape and Gesso
Once we had designed and sent off out outline of our creature, we received two copies of our laser cut design. Our next step was to stick cardboard (flimsy roll of cardboard)on the outline of the laser cut design.
This part was tricky because you have to make it stable, make the sticky tape used to connect both sides straight, and fit your hand in small areas. For my design, the tail in particular was hard because the area between the body and tail was small. Next time I would have gone for a design with less gaps. After sticky taping the flimsy cardboard to the laser cut design, we had to fit the other copy of laser cut design to the exposed top of the flimsy cardboard (the top part of the cardboard in the sketch). I think that I may have accidently put mine on an angle from not fitting the top to the flimsy cardboard to the laser cut design right.
After sticky taping both laser cut designs to the flimsy cardboard, we had to reinforce the connection by applying gesso. The gesso had to cover all surfaces of the piñata because the gesso was used for strengthening the connection, as well as priming the cardboard for paint and glue.
Gluing on Paper & Painting
The beginning of the process began with cutting out more than enough paper. We decided to cut out pieces of paper in isosceles shapes with a rounded bottom to get a scale looking shape that didn’t have a bulky top. After we cut all the paper we could possibly need, we started gluing the paper. We started at the bottom because the paper would layer up in a traditional way, that also looked like scales. One problem was trying to make the arm distinguishable. It didn’t work well because the same paper was used for the whole body. If I were to do it again I would use a different pattern of paper.
After gluing on all of the paper, we had to paint the sides of the piñata. It probably would have been better to paint the piñata before sticking on the paper, but originally we planned on doing all of the sides of the piñata with paper. We weren’t able to carry through these plans due to time restrictions. We decided to paint the sides metallic grey so it would fit well with the metallic paper, but in my opinion it blended too well, taking away variation of colour. Next time I would have probably chosen a light metallic blue to give more contrast, making the piñata more interesting.
Gluing on Pom-Poms and Lights
We started gluing on the pom-poms around the whole piñata. My partner and I weren’t sure about the pom-poms due to the massive contrast in colour between the grey, yellow and blue of the piñata, and the reds and pinks of the pom-poms. After sticking them on, we thought that it did work with the piñata. We also thought that the multicolour lights wouldn’t work (same reason the pom-poms wouldn’t work). It turned out it did work with the pom-poms.
Final Piñata and Group Shots
