Wand. 13" in length. Wood, paper, tape, acrylic paint. 2010.

I apologize for my shadow hovering over it -- it was quite hard to find the right lighting. So, as I said, I designed this for the midnight premier of the latest Harry Potter film. I started out using a wooden stick that was sanded down and smoothed out, 11 inches in length. The stick makes up the tip of the wand down to the handle (although it actually extends beyond that.

I then wrapped about half of the stick in standard printing paper, making sure to thicken the other end of the wand so as to create the handle. This was followed up by wrapping the entire paper and half of the stick in plain masking tape. As of this, I now had a pale brown stick poking out of a rolled up piece of paper wrapped in tape. Completely ugly looking. That's where pain and a hot glue gun came in.

The hot glue gun was first used at the spot where the tape wraps around the stick. I did this in order to seal the two objects together. Making further use of the glue gun, I created a rather poor design around the handle to give it some texture, as well as created a sort of ridge where the handle ends. All of the hot glue parts were painted in gold.

The final touches included painting the handle all black, being careful and using different sized brushes to paint in the smallest areas. I finished with three coats of dark brown paint -- a mix using more red than yellow and blue -- over the rest of the wand. I feel this color, combined with the texture of the masking tape, helped to give it a 'wooden' look.