If You’re Bored At Home This Long Weekend, Why Not Try An Instagram Challenge

If you’re always pottering around the house - amusing yourself by hanging paintings, sorting through pictures, finding old spices to use up - then lockdown is really your time to shine. You’ve probably ticked off the basics, like organising your wardrobe, ironing everything and categorising anything that can be categorised (books, condiments, knickers), but what about the creative challenges circulating on social media? How are you faring on those?

There’s #HomeCouture for the fashionistas, where you’re tasked with recreating a couture outfit using household items like cling film and cardboard, and then there’s something even more chic. It’s, drumroll please, the #oneminutesculpture.

Before you start panicking about a potter’s wheel, no clay is used in the making of this sculpture. The premise, instead, is exactly what it says on the tin. Simply make a sculpture with whatever you have around you. Oh, and you only have 60 seconds.

Fashion director Suzanne Koller’s is a vertiginous tower of chic, with coffee table books, candles, consoles, money clips, lipsticks and patent court shoes.

Victoria Steiner’s, shaped like a rocket and inspired by Suzanne’s, features a Jacquemus bag sitting on top of a wine glass sitting on top of a Byredo candle. It was structurally sound enough for her to take a snap so, seriously, bravo.

Lorna Juett took a less high-risk strategy, balancing a beer can on top of a ceramic dinosaur. She topped the whole thing off with a tulip - and a half a lime on the dinosaur’s tail for a final flourish.

Of course, it’s already morphed into something more extreme. Tyler Joe (aka Tyler The Content Creator) is just one of the ‘grammers to tackle the #towerchallenge, stacking chairs, tables, cans of tomatoes, jugs, bananas and incense sticks on top of each other.

To get the best shot possible, it’s all about the lighting. If you’ve got a Google Pixel4, we recommend getting to grips with its dual exposure function. Open your camera, tap anywhere on the viewfinder to bring up the sliders and play around with the brightness/shadows slider until you’ve found the perfect balance of light and dark. The iPhone's portrait mode, meanwhile, is always a safe bet for capturing pin-sharp images.

Why not give it a try this long weekend? At least you’ll have something to show off on Zoom.

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