If you plan to apprentice yourself to Nick Bantock, you’ll need a lot of art supplies. I had most of them already, although I had to go out and purchase different types of paper at various points in the process, along with matte medium. There were a couple exercises that instructed readers to go to thrift stores and buy, essentially, junk, and something in me bristled at this. I was in the process of getting rid of junk and didn’t want to accumulate more.

You’re simply much more likely to find unicorns and fairies than dragons and monsters on the knickknack shelf at Goodwill.

Still, I had intended to do every exercise, so I relented, and I’m pleased and amused with this one. Exercise 10 asked readers to find a cheap item that represented themselves (Bantock’s was a taxidermied skunk that had sat so long in a window it was bleached white) and mount it in a box with other items that seemed to go along. My diorama is conveniently situation within a cigar box, which I acquired, along with all the trimmings, at Goodwill.

For the purposes of this exercise, I am a pewter unicorn, sitting upon a mirror, surrounded by colored glass, mounted inside a wooden cigar box, with a playful tile roof. The unicorn is chill and so am I.