Three years ago I delivered 120 magazines to the art department of North Bend High School.

These weren’t flimsy, half-page, “last chance” catalogs from an online outlet store. No, these babies averaged more than 200 pages each: thick, full color magazines filled with stories about food and travel and sports. They were printed on glossy paper and studded with little merchandise cards.

The cards smelled of perfume or leather or just plain money, and the magazines were heavy. Stuffed into grocery bags, the delivery required several trips down halls and up stairs, using a mobile folding luggage cart.

Ultimately, they were graciously received in Room 35 by NBHS art educator Nunzio Lagututta, who had plans to tear them all into tiny pieces.

Correction. His students would tear the magazine tonnage into tiny pieces, as they processed through the creation of magazine mosaic portraits.

Some of the portraits are featured in the Coos Art Museum’s current exhibition (through April 12), where a pair of them won cash prizes for Laguttuta’s art students. Cassie Mostert, a junior, took home First in Show, the second-highest award overall. A self-portrait by 12th grade student Josh Salmon nabbed second place in his division. The magazine mosaic portraits are a medium Laguttuta has employed for a number of years, and through several levels of art instruction.

“I won’t ever not work with them,” he states. “Basically this is a recycle medium and a two-fold project.”

As his students pour over the magazines, they’re looking for color. In the process, of course, they’re reading.

They are asked to create a portrait based on a favorite picture or photograph of a friend, family member or movie star. The photograph is enlarged by means of a grid, and the artist then creates what Laguttuta describes as a color map. Students find, he notes, that the total range of colors may be found in the human face.

Shaping and modeling of the portrait is accomplished with color. Students rapidly learn that the smallest pieces of torn paper permit the most subtle gradations. As light washes across a face from an open window, the bridge of a nose may be highlighted while an eye is thrown into shadow, and the artist strives to find the perfect shade for their grid, from page after colorful page of the magazines.

Today, Laguttuta’s classroom contains stacks of the completed portraits. The mosaics are formed from thousands upon thousands of pieces of paper, ripped from one page and reassembled onto another. One portrait features hair that is composed of pictures of hair. Tendrils and strands were carefully cut from a glossy magazine, and then glued to the mosaic’s grid — a clever riff on the notion of recycling. Laguttuta’s classroom is a lair of recycled projects. He uses newspaper for papier mâché sculptures and shows off a colorful, functioning kaleidoscope formed from a fat-free Pringles tube.

Those plastic drink carriers that cause such grief for marine life are transformed, with staples and a little paint, into three-dimensional snowflake sculptures. Donations of cardboard are stacked and then cut into contour art forms, and all of the discarded classroom clay is reconstituted and reused.

A local merchant, O’Neil’s Glass, donates both glass and plexiglass to Laguttuta, who leads his students in the creation of layered paintings which he then reassembles with washers and screws.

Students are encouraged to bring in cans of discarded house paint, used for the priming and prepping of classroom canvases.

And magazines. Magazines are always welcome in Laguttuta’s classroom, where reading and recycling go hand in hand for students who study art.

Teri Albert reviews art and artists for The World. Comments on or story ideas for this column are welcome, and can be e-mailed to malbert@uci.net.