Pop Art Canvas Marmite Jar From Recycled Paint Chip Cards

The strap line for Marmite has always been “Love it or Hate it”. To be honest, I am fairly ambivalent to the taste. I like it with cheesy toast, but find a little goes a long way. I am however very drawn to its visual branding. Its very pop art and perfect for high impact art projects. This Pop Art Canvas Marmite Jar made from recycled paint chip cards is a perfect example.

Materials:

Paint Chips, or other coloured paper in suitable colours
PVA glue
A Canvas or board
Paper and pencil
Scissors

Method:

The project took most of the summer holidays. I kept as many of the paint names in as possible. I made this a few years ago, before I started blogging, so don’t have any WIP photos unfortunately. The process was fairly simple (if time consuming).

This artwork is a canvas, approximately 2m high, made from Dulux colour samples. If you cant get hold of paint chips, magazine or food packaging cut up could be very effective.

The first thing I did was sketch the marmite jar in simple form on a piece of paper. I then scaled this up on the computer, and printed out the sheets to give me a master template. This helps to keep all the components to scale. Once you have the master template the size you want, cut out the basic jar shape.

Make the component templates:

Use the master template to make a separate template for each of the main components. For my jar, there were 7 plus the letters: The brown jar; the yellow label, the lid, the white interior of the label; the red banner; the green detail and the marmite pot. Each of the letters needed a template too. This sounds complicated, but its really not. For the size I selected, I’m not going to lie, it is time consuming.

Assembly

Once you have the component templates, its a case of gluing and assembling. Use the master template to draw on the large canvas where the jar will be. Then start gluing the chips to the canvas. Choose 3-4 basic colours for the background, plus another couple of darker shades for shadow details. Glue appropriate colours to each of the component templates, and set aside to dry. Trim overlapping paint chips as necessary to get crisp edges. Consolidate all of the pieces by layering on top.

I made Pop Art Canvas Marmite Jar by layering up the components of the jam jar, and only combining in the final assembled piece.

I kept the paint chip names and gluey marks on the piece, as it adds an authentic “Im not a print” look to the canvas. It’s one of my favourite ever makes. Apart from the laboriousness of cutting and glueing it was incredibly satisfying and easy to do.