Accent on Art

Accent on Art: Creating cool vases from recycled bottles

by Wade on August 8, 2010

Here is another idea for from my recycled art project collection.   Making these vases really involve a lot of fine motor skills and they look great! Collect and clean out a variety of glass bottles, any size and shape.

1. Rip or cut small pieces of masking tape and place them in random order around the bottle.  Make sure to cover up any spaces.

2. Paint the entire bottle one color and allow one day to dry.  (You can skip this step if you need to complete the project in one session.)

3. Have the student select a main color to use and have a small amount of white or black paint on the pallet.

4. Using Q-tips, dip the Q-tip into the paint and dab it onto the bottle.  Without cleaning the Q-tip, dip in white or black to lighten or darken the shade of the main color.  Continue dabbing the bottle until it is completely covered.  Usually I will have a student change Q-tips once or twice throughout.

5. Allow the vase to dry, usually one day.

6. Decorate with a fresh cut flower or make a flower to add to the vase.  (I used some hydrangeas from my garden!)

7. If you are going to put these out on display, soak a paper towel and wrap it around the end of the flower.  Squeeze it into the bottle.  This way if anyone accidently knocks it over, you won’t have a big mess to clean up!

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Accent on Art: Creating a flower garden with recyclable materials

by Wade on July 31, 2010

I have been enjoying instructing the art portion of our Therapeutic Arts Program at Hochstein.  We have recently started a care for the earth theme with recycle, reduce, and renew concepts.  In this group project I used plastic bottle bottoms and caps, recycled house paint and brushes, and cardboard to create a beautiful flower garden.  Here are the simple steps:

1. Cut off the bottoms of plastic soda and water bottles, save the tops.

2. Use a  white paint primer to coat the bottles and tops.

3. Create flowers using a mixture of old house paint (add acrylic paint to tint), encourage color blending to shade.  We used Q-tips to apply the paint.  Decorate the tops with ladybugs, mushrooms, leaves, bugs, etc.

4. Use old cardboard to create the background.  Use a mix of green and white to create the grassy garden background.  Use an old paintbrush and hold it straight up to dab on the paint to create the texture of grass.

5. When dry (next class), have students one-at-a-time place the flowers/decorated tops on the background.  Encourage cooperation and expressive language skills, “Your turn Mary.”

6. After all the flowers are placed, I used a glue gun to secure the flowers.

7. Musical connection: Find a song about flowers or gardens to share.  You can also create your own song with concepts like- unique, one-of-a-kind, together but different, beauty when we create together, grow and blossom.

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