When Willow School art teacher Andrew Slivka started collecting the caps of marker pens, he wasn’t sure what he’d do with them. But now, Slivka’s created a work of art — the Willow Wildcat mascot made from about 7,700 castoff caps.
“The accumulation started slowly. I have a little organizer and I started tossing caps into (its bins) and then over time it grew to bigger containers,” he recalled. He had barrels in the hallways at Willow so students could drop in their dried-out markers.
His creativity percolated for several years as the number of caps multiplied. His first project made from caps was a small piece that read ART. It took about 250 caps. That project “was a very therapeutic experience stacking and organizing the caps in a honeycomb pattern and I knew at that time I wanted to go a little bit bigger.”
It was when schools in District 153 closed for the pandemic that Slivka started counting and sorting the caps that he’d accumulated and moved to his home.
(Marilyn Thomas/H-F Chronicle)
“My family thought I was a little crazy but then I came up with a design of my wildcat with the rainbow background and basically, because I had redesigned the (district’s) logos — I came up with the cute cuddly wildcat — I thought I’m going to put some rainbow stripes behind it and it’ll be easy.”
If only it were that simple.
The first problem was coming up with a design that matched the number of caps he had. He used an Adobe Illustrator program that helped him lay out the design in a grid so that he could figure out where each color would go. It also gave Slivka a way to come up with a color count.
The fur on the logo appears as a shade of orange, but he didn’t have enough orange caps for the project. Like any good art teacher, Slivka knew red and yellow makes orange. He had plenty of red caps that he could blend with yellow to create the wildcat. Mixing colors “creates texture, depth and shadow and I played around with that a little bit.”
The other colored caps he used for the rainbow background.
Slivka says the project took him about eight months to create. Another problem was how to put it together. He knew he wanted it to measure 4-foot by 4-foot. He made a wood frame and started stacking caps standing up.
“At one point I got about 30 or 40 rows up and they started to go out (of the design pattern),” so he laid the frame flat.
The caps aren’t all the same size. There are several marker manufacturers and each has its own approach to the product. For example, some caps were a millimeter off in size from another brand’s cap. Some have the center accentuated and others have the center recessed.
Slivka says he’s a patient person, but this project really tried his patience. When he was finished, he put a sheet of plexiglass over the caps, glued it, then “tilted (the piece) up, and even though the caps weigh nothing on their own, the middle started to sag because they’re not attached. So that broke my heart,” he said.
That sent Slivka back to the drawing board. Gluing the caps didn’t work. Neither did tape mounts. He jokes that no one’s tackled a project like this, so he couldn’t find a solution on YouTube or Pinterest videos.
“It was a lot of trial and error,” he admits. In the end, he remembered brass fittings he used for a redesigned lamp project he’d done for his mother. They were the right size and with a black cap he could hide them nicely in the piece.
“I finally realized the only way to get this to stay flat on the wildcat was to drill some holes into the caps and mount them,” he said. He used little washers with threads for a screw, “so you put the washer on and a screw through it and the black cap goes on top. These (caps) are half-inch wide exactly and the brass screw caps were half-inch wide exactly. What fate.”
In total, Slivka used 20 of the washers. They are hidden in the black outlines.
This wildcat piece is on display at Willow School and will be mounted on a wall soon.
Slivka’s been an art teacher for 17 years at Willow working with kindergarten, first and second graders. While he took this project on himself, District 153 asked him several years ago to create its newest logo for the district and logos for each of the schools—Willow Wildcats, Churchill Bulldogs and Hart Panthers.
Slivka does some art projects on the side. His degrees are in art education and painting. His website is https://plumoriginals.com/.