Recycled Wood and Paper Florals.

Celebration and Tiny Dancer are florals on recycled wood and paper.

Like most artists, I hate throwing anything out.

For instance, I have used old leftover yarn as underpainting for a floral.  I dunked the old yarn in puddles of paint until the yarn was thoroughly saturated, and then slapped the yarn on the canvas. It created interesting patterns that became the underpinning of the expressive florals in the Carnation can. ( try the yarn trick - you will feel like a child again!)

Or how about the old gift cards I use to scrape paint on canvas? Not all that weird if you are an artist. I know I am not the only artist to use these methods.

What other materials do I have in my art room? This list might only seem odd to you if you are not an artist...  (you realise that if I share my strange collection, I will be asking you to do the same!)

• Cedar deck boards (stored in garage). I use them for pet portrait paintings such as Stout, a French Bulldog
• A bin of used skates - winter decorations once they are painted with winter or Christmas scenes
• A container of shells from beaches around the world used for sketchbook and word picture painting
• A container of dried strawflowers (Xerochrysum bracteatum)
• A container of small, flat pebbles from the beach at Torremolinos, Spain
• Odds and ends of tissue and other commercial or gelli printed papers
• A huge stack of junk or chaos art on watercolour paper

Although I haven’t used shells or strawflowers or even skates in a long time in any of my creations, I keep everything, “just in case”.

Using up wood pieces and junk or chaos art.

When hubby works his magic in the garage, there are often little chunks of wood that I can salvage from his own projects. This is precisely how I came to paint on these little 2.5” x 5” wood blocks.

As I paint, I wipe excess paint onto paper or, in this case, on one side of the wood blocks.  It is so much fun to find the florals amid the paint blobs and to add more paint as needed.

Celebration:

The flowers remind me a bit of buds on long stalks such as delphiniums for example.

I glued a failed acrylic abstract floral on the back of Celebration.

Nothing was wasted! I used up the cut up wood blocks, the leftover acrylic paint on my brush, as well as a failed abstract painting on watercolour paper glued on the back of the block.

Celebration was then varnished to protect the art from dust and dirt.

Tiny Dancer:

Using the same techniques as Celebration, I painted a daisy-like flower dancing in the wind and the title came quite easily on this one.

There is never a boring moment in my art practice.  I work on many projects, and it can be a curse or a blessing. But more about that in a future blog post. However, I know that any and all art work contributes in some way to the learning process.

So now it's your turn!  What odd materials have you kept to use in your creative practice?  Leave me a message in the comment box below.  Or contact me!  I would love to hear from you.