My hall has a soda machine, and one day I decided that I should make a new front for it, to replace the plain "Coke" design that it came with. So, I came up with a design that incorporates our hall logo/mascot the squanch, the name of the soda machine, Soda Lord, and soda in general. The first design I did had just the squanch holding a soda can, with his sign changed changed from "hackito ergo sum" (I hack, therefore I am), to "Dewito ergo sum" (I do the [Mountain] Dew, therefore I am), and the text at the bottom changed to say SoDa lOrd instead of THiRD EAst. After I sent this design out to my hallmates, it was suggested that I alter the graphic to put the modified squanch on a soda can. Since I couldn't figure out how to make the graphic properly curved with the program I was using to make the design, I printed the graphic out, taped it to a soda can, photographed it, then traced over the photograph in a similar way that I did with the East Campus Dorm Shirt.

After I had the design done, I printed it out to full scale. Next, I got some acrylic sheets from Pearl, and since they didn't have sheets large enough for me to do the cover in only one piece, I bought two smaller pieces and used some solvent to fuse the smaller sheets together into a full-sized sheet. I outlined the design in bronze-colored glass paint outliner, and then filled in the areas between the lines with glass paint. I painted the design mirrored right-to-left, on the "back" side of the acrylic, so that the painted surface would be protected from people touching it, since it is near the kitchen. I ran out of yellow after painting the top half of the can, and when I went to get more paint they were out of the brand that I had used, so I had to buy another brand. Fortunately, the colors matched almost exactly. I used paints from some weird German manufacturer called Marabu, and the colors were ultramarinblau dkl (blue), gelb (yellow), reseda (green), and from another company, sun yellow. The translucency comes from sheets of tracing paper I spray glued to the back (glass paint is transparent). If you're wondering, the color gradations are due to the floor in my room not being level and the tracing paper not scattering light enough to obscure the positions of the fluorescent lights on the back side. In April 2005, when a light burned out, the guys replacing the lamp broke the cover in half, and I had to glue it back together again. At the same time, I also put some packing tape around the edges to protect them from chipping and cracking.