How to Make an Oceanic Gope Board Part 2

Now probably the biggest decision you have to make here is which way you want to glue this down. I could do it that way or I could do it this way, and this is going to give me the figurative image that so typical of the Gope boards that you find in Papua New Guinea.

So I’m going to take my spray glue again and go over to the trash can and face down in the trash can I’m going to spray the back of this. And then I’ll be back to place it on the Gope board.

Alright, spray this and let’s see I think I decided well then I like a distraction and what I’m trying to do is center it, so I have a little bit of space here because I’m going to create a border for this. A really good way to get things glued down is you just place a clean sheet of paper on top and rub and before you put your can of spray glue away you’re going to want and turn it up side down and spray it until it runs clear and then your nozzle is not going to get clogged with glue and make it so that you can’t use this again especially when these cans are fairly expensive.

So now we’re going to get down to the business of decorating. First thing you’re going to want to do is pick out on our website or you can print this out. Put your DVD in the computer and print out this page of oceanic designs and patterns. You are also going to want to stick with the earthy colors. We’re trying to stay on that color palette so before I go any further I’m going to go ahead and pick out the oranges, the blacks, the browns. I’m going to stay away from green and blue because green is really grass not earth. We’re talking about the colors that you would literally take from the earth as in clay and we can also use colored pencils and some white and black and you don’t need every earthy color there is, but a little bit of a variety is a good thing.

Let’s just start with we’ll do like a scallop design here. There could be little hills and I’m just going to do this all the way around the border of my Gope board, and actually that’s a good choice because it covers up. My colored pencil lines from the sketching of the actual board. Now, of course you could have picked anything from here. Alright, there’s our border design, so now it’s starting to look like something.

The next step is to pick a color and I think what I’m going to do because I do some decorating on the name and I’m just going to do zigzag lines on all of the brown part. Now you have to realize it doesn’t have to be perfect because we’re going for an overall look, so if your zigzags aren’t perfect all the way around, or they don’t come out evenly it’s not a big deal.

Now I’m just going to finish up this last letter set of dots here, and that will be a decorating part of the name design. And I think maybe I’ll just add a little bit of white here. Now I could come back if I want to and add some more around the border just to brighten it up and then the very last thing you’re going to do is actually you could leave like this after you finished the white border, or you could go and fill in these areas with more designs and patterns.

One thing I might do before I quit is I’m going to add to well maybe one design. This little design’s here represent New Guinea’s spiders. So I think I’m going to go ahead and just do like a little spider design down here at the bottom. Fill it in kind of quickly.

So a little bit more work and this would be finish and I have one here that’s actually been finished out on the edges so you can see I took the idea of the zigzag pattern and kind of alternate a little bit and I used lines and more zigzags, dots, spider design and kind of a funny little thing here with that looks kind of like eyes if we were to turn it this way.

But this board actually is intended to hang. This is the hanger and all I do to make that was take some twine that you can just natural jute and I actually put a bunch of pieces together and braided it. So this is just a braid with some extra jute left over, and then for the raffia. This is the raffia down here and this is actually a natural material. It’s found on the undersides of palm trees and they dye it with different colors. This is the natural color right here and then they make an assortment of different colors that are dyed.

The best way to make these little bundles of raffia is to just unravel part of it and take a small section of it. And what I like to do is just take another little piece I’m just tied it around the center of it just like so because this can be part of the bundle too. And you’ve got to bend it in half like so and give a little hair cut and then I’m going to take my hot glue gun and then put the glue on the back of the Gope board. And then carefully place the raffia in the glue then I’m going to quick make another one. I want them to be symmetrical, fold this in half, let’s put some more hot glue on there. Place your new bundle in there, and there’s your raffia.

Okay, the twine this is real simple. You could do just single twine if you want it to or maybe we’ll try let’s see if we don’t braid we just kind to use three pieces and maybe tie. It doesn’t have to look like the other one and put the knot in the hot glue. And there you have a Gope board.

So we have two totally different designs and when you start this just be careful watch out for the witches.