To honor the splendor of summer and the awesomeness of female superheroes like Wonder Woman, I would like to present a simple summertime craft idea that is fun to make and quite practical for telling time. Using recycled cardboard, some $1 issue copies of Wonder Woman, tape, spray glue and a couple of Photoshopped images, a sundial can be sculpted to give any room or backyard a stylish timepiece.
I decided to make a sundial based on Wonder Woman – with Power Girl too – because I felt female superheroes were underrepresented in the mass media. Even looking back at the myriad of crafts I’ve made about superheroes over the years, I failed to make any concepts purely spotlighting female superheroes (shame on me). The more I explored You Tube; the vast majority of comic book crafts viewed were for the likes of Wolverine, Iron Man and Batman. I felt it was time to give female heroes their due and this sundial is just the beginning!
The base of the design is a collage of Wonder Woman comic book pages. As a comic book collector, tears were shed when I began cutting up the handful of issues needed to cover the cardboard base. Ultimately, a few comics had to be sacrificed for the sake of art (or so I tell myself)! They will be remembered and missed. Let’s have a moment of silence.
The main disc that displays the intervals of time was originally a large baby gate box slated for the recycling bin. I’m always promoting ‘up-cycling/re-purposing’ cardboard and that large box was begging to be made into something! A very large flower pot was used to cut out a perfect circle from the box and Photoshop was utilized to create the time interval design to fit the dimensions of the circle.
The combined images of Wonder Woman and Power Girl, used as the ‘pointer’ to yield the shadow for indicating the time, were originally comic book images scanned and blown-up in Photoshop. The finished image was printed twice as mirror reflections so that the pointer would reflect the same image on each side.
The trickiest part of making the sundial was figuring out where to place it in my backyard to properly reflect the time. My yard is at an unusual angle from where the sun raises and sets – plus abundant tree cover, thanks to my neighbors, makes positioning the sundial tricky. But with a little time, a bright sun and my trusty watch, the sundial found its home and now works like a charm!
Choose your favorite superhero and try making your own. Happy summer everyone!!
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