An Artist Used 1200 Colored Pencils to Build a Working Fender Stratocaster Guitar

If you had to build a guitar from scratch, what types of materials would you use? Plywood? Plastic? Wire? As Design You Trust reports, a YouTuber who goes by the name of Burls Art threw the manual out the window and used colored pencils to build an electrical guitar in the style of a Fender Stratocaster. And yes, it’s a fully functional instrument.

Remarkably, it was the first guitar the artist had ever built, but he said he was “more than satisfied with how it turned out.” A video showing how he created the guitar has amassed more than 16 million views since it was uploaded to YouTube two months ago. Since then, Burls has built a second colored pencil guitar—this time, modeled after a Fender Telecaster.

For his first guitar, he used 1200 pencils, which set him back $120. He already had the other parts on hand, but he said those would have cost him $150. So in total, he paid less than $300 for a guitar that is typically priced between $670 and $2500, depending on the model. Not a bad deal.

He spent two to four hours a day working on the guitar and finished it in a few weeks. Cutting the pencils in half to form a flat, colorful edge and placing them in a box took some time. He then glued the pencils together with epoxy resin, sanded the slab, and used a template to cut it into the shape of a guitar. Other components, like the strings, were added last.

Check out the whole process in the video below, and visit his page for more videos like these.