Business cards, packaging materials and other forms of paper are what Sharon Mount uses to create her tiny replicas of structures--what she calls TinyBuilding.
Designing tiny buildings started out to be a hobby of Sharon’s husband, James. The small replicas were intended to be Christmas ornaments but later on, it became part of their lives as they began to collect business cards and different sorts of papers from all the places they had gone to.
When Sharon’s husband passed away, she continued collecting business cards and making tiny buildings. She says in her blog, “As I sit down to make a TinyBuilding, I feel a delicious sense of opportunity and inevitability. There are so many possibilities, but just one perfect TinyBuilding waiting in the colors, letters and proportions of the card. The challenge is to cut and fold and paste and form the flat cardstock into a three-dimensional replica of four-dimensional memory – of an occurrence, an event, a good time and place and people.”
Key Themes Behind This Trend
- Upcycled Art
- Using materials originally intended for one purpose to create something new, opens up opportunities for creativity and eco-friendly innovation.
- Handmade Crafts
- Connecting with nostalgia and sentimentality through handmade craftwork, provides opportunities for customization and personalized customer experience.
- Micro Art
- Creating miniature art pieces that can fit in the palm of your hand, opens up opportunities for unique and intricate design work.
Where This Applies
- Eco-friendly Packaging
- Companies can explore using upcycled materials such as business cards in their packaging as an environmentally conscious alternative.
- Stationery Industry
- Exploring unconventional materials, such as business cards, in stationery creation can provide opportunities for unique designs and functional innovation.
- Artisanal Craft Industry
- Companies can look to adopt and collaborate with handmade craft artists to expand upon existing product lines and offer personalized experiences to customers.
