How To Make a Can of Soup

Our victim.

At the Art Bank, the gallery I show at, we've normally had a First Friday gallery walk to participate in.  This is great! Really! First Fridays have become quite the event. The problem is, a lot of establishments are now doing something on First Friday, so we are finding that people that go to one event, may not necessarily make it to ours in that same time frame. This is a bummer. And we are going to solve this bummer problem with a hearty can of soup. Here's how:

First, you randomly ask a friend, in the middle of a text conversation on a different topic, if she has a barrel she needs to get rid of. And, amazingly, she says yes. (Thanks, Shirley!) She will even bring the barrel to you. Once you have acquired the barrel, you check it over, making sure the bottom is sound, and that it will fit in your car.

It's green inside!

Once you get it into your car, and into your home, you drag it back outside and coat the entire insides of it with a nice dark spray paint, to hide any icky marks or anything. In my case, I used dark green because I had a can sitting around and I don't often use dark green, so if it wasn't used for this, it was just going to continue sitting there. While you're at it, you can spray the rims of the barrel silver, to freshen them up. Make sure you do this step outside and wear a mask, because apparently spraying the insides of a barrel results in you getting particles all over you, your arm hairs even feel sticky and weird, and the cloud of aerosol just comes right back at your face. So try to lean away when spraying.

Those lines were really hard!

Then you drag the thing up to the Art Bank to be completed while you're the Attending artist for the day. You also take a roll of brown packaging paper and some paint and an Andy Warhol Campbell's soup can. Start by measuring out and painting the background.

Let that dry and add some lettering. Ok, so this doesn't say Campbell's and there are circles instead of yellow fluer d'lis, (excuse my French), but you know what? I'm calling this artistic liberty. And I don't want to get sued by the Warhol estate.

Our label.

Now for the fun part. We get to get a little high (because it was cold and icky outside and I didn't want to ventilate properly. You may do as you please). I used spray adhesive to stick the new label to the barrel. It seemed to work best if I sprayed both the paper AND the barrel and waited a second to stick them together and smooth out the wrinkles. I added a nice clear coat for some shine and Boo-yah! One big can of soup.

That's one big can o' soup! Mmm Yummy!

Now for the why. Why? Because we decided to host a Second Friday as well as our normal First Friday. It even operates under the same, user-friendly hours! 6-9pm! But for Second Friday, we will be more interactive. We will have artist demonstrations, more time to chat one-on-one with our patrons, and will partner up with a charity each month, as a way of connecting with the community. November's Second Friday will have a canned food drive for HVAF, the Hoosier Veterans Assistance Foundation, which helps homeless vets in Indianapolis. Being that Second Friday is two days before Veterans Day, this is fitting. And that big giant can of soup just became a giant receptacle for food donations. Doing it the art way. Boo-yah!

ART Soup. With Special Ingredients