Books:

Discovered! 505
Odd Enterprises

Hidden Dollars

How to Make
Money at Home

Small Business
of Your Own

You Can Own
a Business

Bernard F. Bena, a successful businessman in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, has such a hobby. For the last twenty years, through bad times and good, he's been turning out unique and attractive objects d' art called "Benattes."

Bena conceived the idea while an art student at Carnegie Tech in the early 1930's. He was groping for a practical new approach to art.

"People are great savers of sentimental items," he figured. "Baby shoes and bootees, first locks of hair, wedding gowns, envelopes which bore a cherished message—why not create some attractive and novel object which would employ these keepsakes, at least to some extent, and give them display and meaning?"

Instead of a mere photograph of a baby, how about a picture with real baby hair? Or a bride with wedding dress cut from the material of her actual wedding gown, copied from the original to the last detail?

FOR THE last fifteen years, Bena has operated a successful beauty and millinery shop at 309 Beverly Road in Mt. Lebanon, a prosperous suburb of Pittsburgh.

The Benattes remain exclusively a hobby. Bena works at them off and on in unhurried relaxation at his dining room table, often with one eye on the nearby television set, or conversing with his wife or children while his deft hands piece out the picture. Sometimes his wife and children join in, picking out the materials that will go into the finished Benatte.

Bena firmly believes that the artistic imaginations of his children are developing through their exposure to this infinitely varied hobby.

Benattes combine elements of drawing, painting, tinting, collecting and clothes design.

Bena stoutly contends that almost anyone can make and sell them. If you can't draw, he points out, you can always trace. If yours isn't the mind to design clothes, you can copy them. And Benattes offer all the pleasant features of painting or sketching as a hobby—plus the collector's thrill of accumulating striking materials for the real life touches.

HERE'S A step by step outline of how a Benatte is planned and executed:

"You begin with a drawing," says Bena. "You can take it from any cartoon, or from any well illustrated children's book—from just about anything you want."

For demonstration purposes Bena selects a simple illustration of the old jingle about Jack and Jill and their painful experience on the hill. He inks in the scene on a regular artist's beaver board.

"A good poster board will serve just as well," he says.

If you are not a free hand artist you can copy the Jack and Jill scene from the book by any of the standard tracing techniques. You can place onion-skin over the page to be traced, and trace the drawing off. Or you can place a piece of carbon paper between the page and your poster or beaver board and transfer the drawing directly to the final medium.

If the onion-skin method is used, the tracing on the onion skin is placed over the poster or beaver board and a second tracing process will transfer tile drawing outline.

Another method is to use a Penograph which can be bought for $1 at an art store and permits direct, one-step copying.

"A projector may be used here, too," says Bena, "but of course they are more costly."

The line drawing now is partially tinted. Grass and sky are filled in with suitably blended water colors.

"With the figures of Jack and Jill, of course," Bena says, "you tint only the flesh tones. The rest will be clothed in garments of your choosing and making."

THE SIMPLE water color drawing now becomes the starting point for an interesting range of possibilities. The first step is to clothe Jack and Jill. If you have been interested in Benattes for any length of time you will have saved many scraps of every conceivable material. Bena works with a full box of cloth scraps beside him.

For Jack's pants he chooses a blue checked cotton.

"Don't ever try to cut the material out free hand," he cautions. "Not once in a thousand times will you get it right."

He places a piece of wax paper over the figure of Jack and traces in the outline of the pants. Then he cuts this out of the wax paper, thus giving himself a pattern with which to cut material.

A word of amplification here might be helpful. One does not, of course, attempt to make a complete garment. The principle is similar to that of paper dolls, since the garment is to be placed over a flat figure drawn on paper. The pattern that is made is of the outline of Jack's pants as it is inked onto the drawing.

When the pants are cut out they are pasted on the drawing with household cement. Next a red plaid material is selected for Jack's shirt, a pattern is made with wax paper and this garment is cemented to the figure on the drawing.

Suitable materials are selected for Jill's clothes and they are similarly cut out and cemented.

From here on Bena adds the distinctive little touches that make the picture a creative and appealing object. For example:

How about the heel for Jack's shoe? Cut a tiny fragment of brown cloth and paste it on.

A wisp of red velvet can be cut and pasted to form a hair ribbon for Jill and a patch for Jack's knee.

If you wish you can paint their water bucket an oaken shade and let it go at that. But if you want something more elaborate, cut a small piece of balsa wood and paste it over to form a real wooden bucket.

Or cut tooth picks down to the right length and arrange them side by side on the bucket to create a barrel stave effect. The tooth pick wood is tinted to a weathered color.

If you've used the balsa wood you may wish to ink on lines to achieve the individual stave effect. And you may use this same India ink with a very fine brush to create natural folds and crease lines in the children's clothes.

How about buttons for Jack's overall straps?

"You can buy a pound of buttons for a dollar," says Bena, selecting two buttons, one slightly larger than the other, for the over-all straps.

The larger is pasted to the strap closest in perspective to the eye of the viewer. The one which must appear further away is the smaller.

Certainly when the bucket falls some water will splash. You'd be amazed at what realistic looking splashes you can create by simply streaking the cement away from the bucket in the natural arc that spilling water might be expected to follow.

You may add further touches of reality to the figures by giving them fingernails tiny enough to be in true proportion. This is done with nail polish and a very small brush.

Already you have tinted the grass green with water color or show card paint. But let's make it a little more realistic. Find yourself some mosquito netting in a grass green shade. It can be bought in department stores and five and tens. Pull or cut tiny wisps of this. Paste them to the area of the picture which has been tinted green for the grass.

"Don't attempt to paste it solid," advises Bena. "Spot it in tufts."

Possibly some flowers or a bush or two? Five and ten cent stores have a wide variety of artificial flowers. Take small flowers and spot them through the grass. For shrubs use artificial wheat or parsley, also available at five and tens.

The possibilities continue to be endless and you can go a long way before you reach the saturation point at which your Benatte begins to look over-crowded or overdone. Only you, of course, are the judge of when that point has been reached.

Perhaps you'd care to give the children lashes. Take bristles from a brush, cut them short and paste them around the eyes to achieve long, appealing lashes.

WHEN YOU'VE added as much in the way of detail as you desire you're ready for framing. And framing, Bena contends, is a lively and stimulating hobby in itself.

He always buys unfinished white pine frames. These are subtly tinted to blend with the colors in the picture. Tinting is done by rubbing shoe polish of the desired shade into the wood. It works in and brings about a soft shading. White shoe cleaner is particularly helpful in achieving the attractive and distinguished antique white tone.

Here's an important thing to remember in framing, particularly if you've used old woolens or velvets in the composition of your Benatte. Before placing glass over the picture, insert crushed moth crystals inside the frame and seal them in with brown paper at the back. Then put the glass over. If you don't follow this precaution your carefully selected and executed clothes are likely to be eaten up before your very eyes.

Bena has come to believe that doing Benattes in series is more interesting than doing single pictures.

He is working on a series taken from the Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy books, figures that lend themselves happily to this technique, with their woolen hair and bright clothes.

Another series he has done is taken, from photographs of some of the famous clown costumes developed by Emmett Kelly and other of the great circus comics. He has sold this clown series to a Mt. Lebanon family for decoration of the game room.

Bena also has done graceful and charming figures of child ballet dancers, using lace which he finds particularly interesting to work with.

"There's just no limit to what an individual can do when he gets into a picture," he remarks.

BENA SAYS he knows of no other hobby where each step and phase of the execution is such an individual and fascinating pursuit in itself.

In the accumulation of materials for the clothes there is the thrill and absorbing interest of a collector's hobby. Really distinctive materials, of course, contribute vastly to a distinctive finished product.

The diligent collector can accumulate a wide selection of materials by cultivating tailors and dressmakers for sample swatches. As Bena points out, when you get into the field your mind continually opens to new possibilities for individualistic touches to your picture.

For snow scenes there's cotton, artificial snow or the white squashy paper from the inside of candy boxes. For brick walls or walks a rough, realistic finish may be achieved by sprinkling bird cage gravel over a surface rendered sticky with the cement.

In one picture Bena made for newly married friends he did a bridal scene, using rice actually hurled at the couple as they made their dash from the church. The bride's gown used material from the dress itself.

He hopes some day soon to do them a nursery scene, with an infant whose hair will be their baby's first shorn lock.

To commemorate another first arrival he once created a scene in which a baby held a shoe, fashioned from the first bootee of the baby being honored. The lace portion of the bootee (somewhat lengthened) formed a script writing out the birth date of the child.

He did another in which a baby was shown with a real first tooth in his mouth.

For a somewhat playful couple of his acquaintance he did a set of four pictures, two of them caricaturing the wife, two, the husband. The first set, with hair and clothing fragments taken from the actual people, normally hang on the living room wall. After guests reach a gay mood the pictures are removed—unknown to the guests—and the second set hung to replace them. The second set is identical with the first—except in the second the host and hostess each have an extra set of eyes.

The effect on certain of the guests is electrifying, by all accounts.

BENA CHARGES $5 to $8 for unframed pictures. Framed, they run $3 to $4 more, depending upon the cost of the frames.

You build a market, Bena says, as most other hobbyists do, by giving them away at first. Not, of course, indiscriminately. Give them where they will be seen by many persons, not just one family and its relatively small circle of callers.

Give them to church bazaars and club benefits. Offer them for bridge and door prizes. Be very sure they are signed, and be sure that throughout the bazaar or bridge party they are well displayed with a card bearing your name, address, and phone number.

If you have a store or shop—as Bena does—you are in a particularly fortuitous position for selling them. Bena places them on the walls of his shop, where they make strikingly unusual decorations and attract the eyes of potential buyers.

Door to door selling, he supposes, is not the sales medium it once was. But he believes his early success as a student ("working my way through art school") salesmen indicates the door to door method may not be an unsound one. The seller would have to develop a sales approach compatible with his or her age, circumstances and community.

Some years Bena has found time, working in odd hours to make and sell as many as 150 of these pieces at the prices indicated above. The market will build rapidly, he promises.

BENATTES ARE not the hobby for those of a dogmatic turn of mind, who demand explicit, unvarying step by step formulae for their pursuits.

No one can tell you exactly how to make a Benatte and, conversely, no one can tell you categorically what not to do. You start with a water color drawing and set about giving it distinctive and suggestive detail.

No one can say what is too much detail, nor what is too little. None can say what particular feature of the picture would be brought out with a touch of actual substance, and which features should remain merely paint or tint.