Tatebanko

When my main squeeze and I were in Portland last week, I found a Tatebanko kit in the art section of Powell's City of Books. According to the cover, tatebanko is a "forgotten Japanese art of creating amazing dioramas and scenic perspective from paper." For ten bucks, I figured a little art project that would become decor was a worthwhile purchase. 


I opened it up the other night, and was instantly confused. It came with all of these pieces...

... not to mention that the directions were originally in Japanese, and then translated to English. And they were sparse. The first direction basically read "Cut out the pieces, and glue them down, dummy." 


So I started cutting and gluing.

It was going well until I hit this roadblock:

Pieces 6, 7, 8 and 9, all had As, Bs, and Cs, on them. What am I supposed to do with that business? I just stuck with my  strategy to keep cutting and gluing, now in alphabetical order. 

Ooohh... it's coming together! 

Now it has sides! This was harder to accomplish than I had imagined.

And a front!

This finished project! I love it. I think it's the best 10 bucks (plus 2 hours of cutting and gluing) I've spent in awhile. 


Uh-oh. Leftover pieces. That's no good, right?

Um, Dear 20A, 20B, 21A and 21B- where the feez do you guys go?








Oh, I get it.

One of you holds up this explanation written in English. The other holds up the version in Japanese. (I'm assuming that it says the same thing in Japanese. It may say something along the lines of "Some dumb American bought this. Laugh at them." I'll never know the real truth.)


Anywho, it was a fun project. A little artsy, a little craftsy. Good stuff.


Oh, and I forgot my favorite part.


This dude:

It's a little surfer dude. If you go to the website, it suggests where to glue him. I'm trying to figure out a way to make him mobile, so I can move him all around the diorama. 


The whole time I was working on it (when I wasn't puzzling over the lack of directions) I was thinking of other applications for this technique. I wanted to buy more kits, but the company doesn't ship them outside of Japan. And, I can't buy them online from Powell's. And they are over $100 bucks on Amazon. So I'm thinking of making my own. I think Van Gogh's "Starry Night" would look amazing, if I can figure it out. And, wouldn't it be fun to make one out of personal pictures? Like a little diorama of a vacation or something? I have ideas. I'll keep you posted. 


(Also, "diorama" is nearly impossible for me to spell correctly. My fingers literally freeze on the keyboard, no idea where to go after the "di-". So I just fill in letters phonetically and then wait for the squiggly red line to appear underneath. Ah well. Can't be good at everything, right?)