Scrape Exchange Friend and Family Show

This is my second year putting something in to the Scrape Exchange Friend and Family show.  It is an open art show that is designed to show ways you can reuse and recycle items to create art. I enjoy putting something in the show because I often have a some kind of recycled material in my art.  Going back to one of my very first blogs "Project of the month" you can see some of my love for reusing paper into something new.






















Last year for the show I put in two small pieces that I called "Scrape booking scrape collages"  At the time I had been working on a scrape book with my sister and my niece and there were so many pieces of left over picture from when we would cut out an image to fit our layout.  I felt like we were throwing away half of the picture.  I came up with a design using these discarded picture pieces and a shaped hole punch.  To add to the recycling I took a box (one is a mac and cheese box and the other was packaging for blank cps) that would have gone to the recycling bin and covered it with newspaper.

I think they are kind of fun and whimsical.

For this years entries I was feeling very inspired by trees.  In general I find this to be true as I look back over my art from the past few years. My first piece I made a Cherryy tree branch using a brown paper bag, a white plastic bag and paper beads made from birthday paper.  Even the canvas in this case is reused as I got it from a friend about to throw it in the trash.  It had some writing on it but I covered it with layers of blue tissue paper in various shades (lucky thing i just had a birthday and had plenty in supply).  I wired the flowers on the canvas after I constructed the branch.  This idea has been floating in my head for awhile now so I am excited to finally having a reason to take the time to bring it to life.

My second piece I call Whimsy Tree.  I painted the canvas this time to cover up what had originally been on it then glued circles of magazines I had cut out in shades of green.  This made up the leaves and flat flowers for the base of the tree.  I used more brown paper bag to create the trunk and branches of the tree.  I love when art has 3D elements to it so I finished it off with some bottle caps for raise leaves and flowers.  The grass is more tissue paper reused.  Finally to give it a little more whimsy I added purple detailing.






On Friday Brett and Britt and I went to check out the exhibit at the Green Gallery at the Scrape Exchange to see all the different pieces the artist put together.  It is exciting to see my work up in the gallery...even if they hung it the wrong way...I fixed it ;)





                     

Just for fun here are a few other things I have made in the last few years that use recycled materials.  I love using old magazines....and I often find myself drawn to circular shapes.  

 More to come soon :)