Twinkle Twinkle Little Car was my (personal) second daily-driver art car. I decided to make a more 3-dimensional art car this time, instead of painting. CDs reflect light in rainbows of colors and I decided this would be the medium, but I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to create the piece. I thought and thought, and then one night I dreamt what she ultimately ended up looking like. I researched local and statewide software distribution companies and called them to ask if they had any discarded CDs from misprints I might be able to take off their hands. One company was here in Houston, the other in Dallas. I got full sized and business card sized CDs. I cut them into 1-2" squares with wood burning pens by scoring them in a tic-tac-toe pattern. I then bent them until they broke into useable pieces. Because I was lucky enough to get software CDs, I was able to get many of the same printed CD. I separated the cut pieces by color - red, yellow, green, purple, blue, etc. Once I started gluing them on the car, I glued them into "rivers", flowing across and down the car. As the car evolved every year from 2001-2007, her appearance changed. Many layers were added. At one point I painted the CDs before I cut them. The very last year my husband, Mike, and I actually spent 40 hours painting the printed pieces ON the car with One Shot Sign Painters Enamel in different colors. This looked great, but was very different from its conception. The pieces used to make the silver-rainbow "rivers" were replaced, added, replaced/added often. The sun baked the printed and silver sides of the CDs and caused them to fade and peel, sometimes the printing peeling off totally and just leaving a small square of clear plastic! I LOVED driving this car. She had a super-duper jacked up stereo system and a standard transmission. She was my ex-husband's previous car and had that special VX engine, that when new, got 50 miles to the gallon!!! Once all the CDs were glued on, I got 30-33 mpg. Still great, especially for an art car!! In 2007 I bought a Honda Accord to make Shattered Vanity. It was an all-consuming project and didn't leave any time for updating Twinkle in 2007. She became my husband's "new" car as I worked on my "new" art car. Mike was hassled in this car, probably because it's a pretty "girly" looking car, but also because he drove way outside the loop to school and to visit his daughter and a man in a girly car is not easily accepted, unfortunately. One day the car was vandalized while he was in it in Galveston at a stoplight. We decided to deconstruct her in May of 2007. She was stripped of all her layers and layers of CDs and silicone, sanded all the way to the metal, and then primered and painted glossy black (again with One Shot) by us. June 27th she was totalled when Mike was broadsided in an intersection. All that work, all those years, great little car, only 113 thousand miles, all gone, poof!
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