Stunningly detailed cardboard robots
Greg Olijnyk creates cardboard robots that resemble characters from a stop-motion cartoon, motivated by his love of science fiction and curiosity with all things mechanical. My Contemporary Met quotes him as saying, “My art is the culmination of a lifetime of reading science fiction, acquiring books by sci-fi illustrators, and creating hundreds of plastic Airfix models as a child. And infinite hours spent poring at photographs of fascinating mechanical devices, bygone scientific apparatus, and building features.
In Melbourne, Olijnyk conducts his graphic design business during the day and creates his cardboard robots in his free time as a labour of love. The gifted artist uses his instincts and works inside the constraints of his selected medium rather than pre-planning how his figures would look. It is quicker to figure things out as you go, he says. “Finding a robot’s head shape and holding the 3D component in your hands will influence the shape of the body and so on and offers detail and additional things I hadn’t considered of until that point.”
Olijnyk is able to create geometric, angular shapes out of cardboard that are ideal for his droid subjects. He says working with cardboard is versatile, robust, and forgiving. “Things are simple to bend, cut, and wrap around to form tubes, and PVA glue dries quickly and is inexpensive!” The artist frequently recycles packaging that he finds around the house, but he also uses card in a range of thicknesses, from 0.25 to 1 mm. When he needs an even smaller card to make tiny details or tiny tubing, he says, “UberEats sacks are also a terrific resource because it’s the same colour.”
Olijnyk painstakingly cuts and adheres every cardboard piece together using a variety of instruments, along with a scalpel, a metal ruler, tweezers, a circle cutter, a hole punch, and a tiny squeeze bottle for the glue. His more complex creations can take several months to build, frequently with bending limbs and incorporated LED lighting. Another has a clock embedded inside its chest, and one even has a “Vesbot” car with rotating wheels. The modest artist reveals that although the sculptures appear to be incredibly complex, they are all built of only one straightforward bit of cardboard adhered to some other piece of cardboard adhered to another.
See more of Olijnyk’s cardboard robots on Insta or have a look at a few of them below.
Greg Olijnyk, an artist, hand-crafts amazingly intricate cardboard robots.
They resemble characters straight out of a stop-motion movie.
Even some of them have LED illumination!
Source: Instagram