Japanese artist and senior at Musashino Art University Nasa Funahara builds beautiful painterly compositions completely out of masking tape. She has an extensive collection of the material that she collects and eventually transforms into impressively detailed works of art. “I own about 450 rolls,” she said. “Whenever I find a color or pattern that I like I end up buying it.”
Each large-scale piece takes about one week to complete. Funahara reproduces famous paintings like Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa by cutting and pasting layers of the variously colored and textured tapes together into the compositions. From a distance, each work mimics the original in a basic recognizable form. The bonus is that, when up close, the exciting masking tape layers reveal themselves in an exciting array of colors and patterns.
