Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Recycling Our Art

As you probably already know, I'm a big fan of repurposing, reusing, and recycling. (You can read about my sickness here.) Now we're recycling our own stuff - reusing our created art for more art.

A few weeks ago we painted a class mural. As you can see, it began as a more representational piece.


But became very abstract by the time we were done.


Our masterpiece has been on display in our room for a while, inspiring us and filling space on the bulletin board.


This week, I cut some strips from it and punched circles. We were creating gardens with collage materials and I added these circles to our other random paper pieces for collaging.




I like the variations of color--and the streaks--within each circle.

When they came to the table, I told the children that the circles were from our painting (no longer on display). I heard one girl repeat the explanation to other children when they came near the collage activity.

One child decided to create using only these circles.




Next week we're doing some gluing to create fish and these circles (and maybe other shapes from our painting) will be a part of that activity, too.

And I plan to cut off one piece of the original art and frame it, so I can remember and admire the masterpiece for days to come.


Photos by R. Scott Wiley