Apr 22, 2010

Styrofoam Mosaic: Peanut Tree



Our Recycled Art
By Julia, 5th grade
In the art room we collected styrofoam packaging peanuts to be used for an Earth Day project. We decided to create a mosaic of a tree using peanuts as our “tiles”.





A bunch of kids helped out to mix tempera paint and create lots of colors to brush on the peanuts.









After decorating all the peanuts in different colors we used Elmer’s glue and spread it all over the also-recycled cardboard.






Following the sketch lines we created the giant tree to symbolize recycling and saving trees for Earth day.






Here's another artist who makes mosaics with post-it notes and uses stop-motion animation:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpWM0FNPZSs&feature=player_embedded

9 comments:

  1. Anonymous4/29/2010

    It was really fun painting the peanuts! I had a very fun time

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4/29/2010

    It was a great project, and I liked painting the styrofoam peanuts. I was sad when we had to go!

    Lily, 2A

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous5/01/2010

    Hey, I found a cool video to show you. It's awesome! Go to this link to see it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u46eaeAfeqw. I love it. Bye.

    Paris

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks, Paris! What a fantastic video... The music pumps lots of energy into the film, and the illustration transitions are very creative. I'm inspired. I will be bringing a whiteboard to the art room tomorrow. Bring ideas.

    ReplyDelete
  5. beautiful love the texture

    ReplyDelete
  6. I tried this and it was an epic fail. We could not get paint to stay on the peanuts. We also found that some peanuts are the dissolving kind and they shrank away to nothing! Would love to make a mosaic out of recyclables sometime, but I don't think we can do the foam peanuts!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for posting this comment, I applaud your efforts! Sounds like you had biodegradable packing peanuts which are made from corn starch and dissolve in water. We did this project 5 years ago, when styrofoam was still king -- tempera paint and elmer's glue worked well with them. Another mosaic idea uses colored plastic lids & bottle caps (hot glue gun needed).

      Delete
  7. What a wonderful project. Makes me think of other things those peanuts (styrofoam ones) could be used for, like insulating a wall or something.

    ReplyDelete
  8. About the waste Styrofoam, our company INTCO also has many machines to deal with it. Our company has compactor, melter, dewatering machine, and crusher which all can deal with it. Here is our website: http://www.intcorecycling.com/styrofoam-recycling-solutions.html

    ReplyDelete