Yes, that is an art made with switch boards, and it’s beautiful. Switch board art is the newest and greatest thing in home and office decorating.

All you’ll need to make your house or place of business beautiful is a trip to your local shop and the will to make the following choices:

how many colors do I want, what style of switchboard art should I make, and what kind of theme do I want? That’s pretty much it! Then all you have to do is wait for your art to arrive! It’s just that easy!

Getting started on your own switchboard art

So you want your own switchboard art? Great!

Switchboard art is easy to make and hard to explain. I know this because when I started doing it, my goal was to make art like the famous artists. But when I finished, my goal was to explain what I had done in simple terms so other people could do it too. It was a difficult transition.

I don’t think any of the famous switchboard artists would have recognized their work in what I was doing. They were inspired by the artistic movement called Dadaism, which was an attempt to break all the rules of conventional art at once. What they did was highly symbolic and highly abstract, but it wasn’t random or accidental or careless or easy.

It took real skill just to get things that looked vaguely like what they were supposed to represent, including many false starts and wrong turns that ended up being cut off and hidden inside the sculpture. Even the simplest looking pieces are full of hidden parts that aren’t obvious until you notice them yourself–and then wonder why you never noticed them before.

How can you get started? The best way is to look at some examples by the famous artists, especially Marcel Duchamp’s “Large Glass,” which looks at first glance like a simple piece

So, you want to make a switchboard. Where to begin?

Well, there are a lot of different kinds of switchboard art. Some of it is very simple, and some of it is quite involved. I’ve made a few different kinds, and I’ll try to give you some advice on how to get started.

I’ll start with the simplest kind, which I call “switchboard calligraphy.” You can do this with just paper and pencil and an eraser. You don’t need any special equipment: just paper, pencils and erasers, and maybe a ruler if you’re picky about straight lines.

It’s not something you can sell for much money, but it does keep you busy while you’re waiting in an airport or riding on a train. You can also use it as a way to learn calligraphy techniques that will be useful when you do other switchboard art.

This is not an overnight process

A lot of advice to artists is, “Be bold! Have courage! Be fearless!” I submit that the best art comes from artists who are not afraid to be afraid.

The best art comes from artists who are not afraid to be afraid. They let themselves feel the fear, but then do it anyway.

The goal is not to eliminate fear—no one can do that—but to find productive ways of dealing with it.

Find the initial inspiration for your art piece, don’t buy it.

The real work is in the implementation. The initial idea is just a seed that needs to be developed into a whole piece of art. Find the initial inspiration for your art piece, don’t buy it.

I have always found inspiration everywhere. Life itself is full of it. I have never had to “find” it, I just allow it to happen naturally. Therefore my life is full of stories, images, ideas, experiences that are sitting there waiting to be used.

A lot of people think that they have to “go out” and buy something so they can work on their art. But the truth is that the best things are usually already there waiting for you, inside your head or heart or imagination, so you don’t have to look anywhere else for them.

They say that if you want to write a story about a woman who lives in a house beside a river then you shouldn’t go out looking for one, because if you do then you’ll be influenced by all the other houses beside rivers that you see and then your story will be “about” those houses beside rivers, not yours.

Most artists don’t even need to know what their art is going to be about before they start working on it. They just need to find an initial inspiration and get started.

The tools you need are pens, paper, scissors, tacks or thumb tacks, plus cellophane bags

It is easy to make your own switchboard art. All you need are pens, paper, scissors, tacks or thumb tacks, plus cellophane bags.

Start by getting a standard letter-size piece of paper. I suggest that you get a pad of paper so that you have plenty of extra sheets to cut up if you make mistakes. I have never made a mistake while making switchboard art, but I have sometimes noticed that my first attempt at something didn’t come out quite right. Use any kind of pens you like–pens are fun to have in many colors.

Now draw something on the paper. It can be anything you want it to be–a face, a house, a map, a maze, anything that takes your fancy. Add some windows and doors and other details if you feel like it. You will see that this is just like making a collage or an artist’s book; there are no rules about how detailed or simple your drawing should be.

My sketches tend to take the form of houses with cutouts for windows and doors; I like houses because they can also represent animals very well (you can use the mouths for noses) and because they are useful when I want to make up stories about them.

The best place to get all these materials is an office supply or school supply store. You could try using a stapler, but it’s tricky; you’ll do better to get thumb tacks and bags.

Under ideal conditions, all you need to make a switchboard picture is paper and pens: good quality drawing paper and drawing pens (also called technical pens or felt-tip pens).

But I like working with color. To use color, you need paper that takes colored ink; newsprint won’t work. And you need drawing pens that take liquid watercolor — the kind that come in bottles, not markers.

I like the ones that come in double-ended tubes (usually two browns and two blues), because then you don’t have to worry about which end to write with; just pull out what you want. But if you can’t find those, any set of four liquid watercolors will do, although the colors may not be as vibrant.

Use marker pens to draw over the board

I would draw on the switchboard art. I would use different colored marker pens. I could make the shapes of letters and numbers by overlapping them with other marker pens, or by drawing with a marker pen in my hand.

The way you do it is you have your marker pens in your hand, and you hold the telephone receiver in your other hand, and you’re swinging the receiver around in big circles above your head. You can look up at the receiver while you’re doing it, but it’s better if you don’t because then you can’t see how it’s coming out.

But there are some things I would be careful about. If the switchboard has a cord that’s too thick, I wouldn’t grab it to keep myself from falling over while I’m doing the thing with the marker pens. And if there was anything sharp nearby I wouldn’t grab it with my free hand because I might cut myself and bleed on everything.

Show it off to your friends

Figure out the differential benefits of your art work

Think about a work of art you really love, something you’ve spent a lot of time with. Why do you love it so much?

This is an important question to ask, because it’s impossible to make something good unless you know what good means. If you don’t understand what makes your favorite work of art good, odds are that anything you make will be worse than it should be.

To make better stuff, you need to figure out how it got made in the first place. If you can’t figure out why your favorite work is your favorite, then that’s probably where your attention should go.