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Off-the-clock: Turning a soda can into a piece of art

Drafting supervisor uses his artistic and technical design skills to create one-of-a-kind aluminum sculptures.

Russell McMillen stands next to his artwork displayed in a break room at Denver Water.

Silver pieces gleam in the sunlight, and he smiles as colleagues walk by and wonder at his work.

Image of a man sitting at a table with two abstract sculptures. — Russell McMillen and two of the aluminum sculptures he made from melted-down soda cans. Photo credit: Denver Water.

“Wow! What is that?” (It’s a futuristic-looking piece of art.)

“You made this? How?” (He made it using aluminum cans melted in his home forge.)

“It looks like coral. You should put it in a fishtank.” (Yes, he once put a piece in his fishtank. It tarnished.)

McMillen is a surveyor by trade and the drafting supervisor at Denver Water, where he’s done design drafting since 2012. He works with the utility’s engineering team using CAD systems to develop the construction plans for contract documents used to build capital projects.

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His hobby, honed over seven years of learning and practice, is creating art from melted aluminum soda cans.

It’s a hobby that uses his drawing and design skills from work, where he works on projects as broad as creating profiles of pipes, or something as specific as the details on a forest road access gate.

Because design drafters draw a wide variety of things, they typically have an appreciation for interpretive art since some plan details are created from scratch and require an artistic eye.

It’s a perfect bridge to his sculptures, which have their own interpretive design elements.

“I got into doing this because my wife drinks Diet Coke,” McMillen said. “She’s a Realtor, and she’s always on the go, so she’s drinking multiple cans a day.”

That means the family has a lot of soda cans heading for the recycling bin every week.

When McMillen saw a YouTube video of an artist melting aluminum soda cans to make metallic art pieces, it gave him an idea.

“I’ve got a steady supply of materials here,” McMillen said. “Why not try it?”

McMillen crushes the empty soda cans and stores them in 55-gallon trash bins, along with any other type of aluminum materials destined for garbage or recycling.

“Once the trash cans are full, I start melting aluminum,” McMillen said.

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McMillen uses his forge to heat the aluminum, which is basically a fire-proof cylinder about 2 quarts in size with an 8-pound graphite crucible at the center that holds the metal while it melts.

Once the propane-run forge is heated to about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, McMillen opens the lid of the forge, places crushed aluminum cans in the graphite crucible and closes the lid so the metal will melt.

“It’s a pretty repetitive process. Open the lid, drop the cans in, close the forge lid, wait, check on it a few minutes later and repeat,” McMillen said.

As the cans melt, they separate into nearly pure aluminum and aluminum slag, which is a debris-like paint or nonmetal.

An image of metal-working tools and a black container. — McMillen’s forge can melt 500 aluminum cans in two hours. The melted metal is poured into a rectangle mold to cool. Photo credit: Russell McMillen.

“About half of the material turns out to be slag, which can be easily skimmed off the top as the aluminum melts,” McMillen said. “If slag is left in, you’ll see darkened areas in the sculpture where the aluminum isn’t pure silver and shiny.”

Once the aluminum is melted, McMillen pours it into a form about the size of a small bread loaf pan. As the melted metal cools and hardens, it forms an aluminum bar that weighs about 4 pounds.

“It takes about two hours and 500 cans to make a single bar of aluminum, but it only takes about 20 minutes to melt one of the bars,” McMillen said.

To create the art pieces, McMillen combines the melted aluminum with small plastic water beads, also called sensory beads, which he buys from a school supply store.

Sensory beads are used in schools and daycares, often for learners who have autism or sensory needs. When soaked in water, these tactile beads grow hundreds of times in size.

McMillen soaks the beads for about 36 hours to completely hydrate them, and then drains the excess water from the beads.

“I take the hydrated beads and put them into a metal bucket,” McMillen said. “Then I take an aluminum bar and melt it in the forge.”

An image of a hand holding a silver bar. — This aluminum bar started as many, many aluminum soda cans. Photo credit: Russell McMillen.

The second process removes any remaining slag that can be skimmed off, resulting in a smooth, silver liquid.

Next, McMillen pours the melted aluminum over the hydrated sensory beads in the metal bucket.

As the metal contacts the beads, it very quickly creates lines, arcs and shapes in an abstract design.

“I typically give it a minute or two to solidify. Then I reach in with thick gloves or a big set of pliers to take it from the bucket,” McMillen said.

Each piece is unique, as it completely depends on how the material adheres to and around the water beads.

“This is thermal dynamics at work,” McMillen said. “The water in the beads turns to steam when the hot aluminum is introduced, which keeps the aluminum from touching the beads and fills all the voids between the spaces.”

He’s learned that by pouring the material slowly, any remaining impurities settle to the bottom and don’t get into the finished piece.

“It results in a cleaner, more polished look,” McMillen said.

An image of an abstract silver sculpture on black fabric. — McMillen’s one-of-a-kind sculptures are the result of water-filled beads exploding into steam as molten metal is poured over them. Photo credit: Denver Water.

He gently brushes or knocks off any water beads that weren’t covered by the molten metal as it poured into the bucket.

Sometimes the aluminum stretches or pushes away the beads, creating long or thin strips of metal. McMillen says the strips create either a unique effect or a possible weak link in the artwork, depending on how thin the strips are.

“After they’re hydrated, the water beads grow into different sizes, which makes for interesting possibilities when the aluminum wraps around them,” McMillen said.

To learn how to make the sculptures, McMillen studied YouTube videos of different aluminum artists and read about the process.

“One artist has an extremely large crucible where he used a 55-gallon drum full of beads and made a sculpture 3 feet in height,” McMillen said.

“It could be really cool as outdoor art,” McMillen said. “I had one coral-looking piece in my fish tank, but the aquarium salt reacted with the aluminum over time, creating a white tarnish on the piece, so I took it out.”

He learned how to make his first forge, using an old fire extinguisher, charcoal briquettes and a hair dryer attached to a long steel pipe, from one of those YouTube videos.

“The briquettes were cool, but it took of lot of them and a lot of time to heat it up,” McMillen said. “And the fire extinguisher couldn’t hold as much material as I needed, so about four years ago, I bought the forge.”

Over seven years of practice, McMillen has made over 30 pours, resulting in seven pieces of art that he’s proud of.

An image of a workshop with stacks of aluminum bars. — Stacks of aluminum bars that used to be soda cans. Photo credit: Russell McMillen.

“The funny thing is that I made a lot of pieces that just didn’t work,” McMillen said. “The beauty of this is when a piece doesn’t work, I can just toss it back into the forge, melt it down again, and eventually make it into something else. It’s no loss.”

McMillen finds his hobby calming, with evenings spent sitting on his driveway, working at his forge on the most time-consuming part of the process — melting the cans.

“It’s similar to being at a campfire at night, as there’s something very mesmerizing about it, like when the materials have different colors as they burn, often green or blue and sometimes red,” McMillen said. “It’s especially good on colder nights.”

He’s still learning how to form the pieces into specific shapes, experimenting with pouring the aluminum into patterns in the bucket.

“I haven’t had a lot of success with it holding the continuity,” McMillen said. “I did a piece that was circular on the outside and geometric on the inside. But I used too much aluminum, and it just didn’t turn out. You learn as you go.”

An image of a tall glowing sculpture. — The story behind the piece: McMillen used aluminum and a clear acrylic door handle salvaged from a relative’s burned motor home, added an LED light to it and made a memento for his aunt. Photo credit: Russell McMillen.

Using his drafting and CAD knowledge, McMillen has thought about using a 3D-printed form that would disappear when he pours the melted aluminum into a mold or using a sand-casting process to make custom pieces, like drawer pulls.

However, with a family and a full-time job, the water-bead process McMillen uses now is less time-consuming.

“There’s one piece that we have on our mantel that my wife likes a lot, which she’d love for me to replicate and sell in a booth at an art fair or farmers market,” McMillen said.

“I just have no way of predicting how these pieces are going to turn out. It would be a ton of effort to create enough art to sell at an art fair,” he said.

“One of the exciting things about this hobby is an element of surprise,” McMillen said. “It’s all unplanned. You just try it and see what happens. It comes out the way it comes out, and that’s part of the fun.”