Hi there! I’m Jeremy, and today we’re going to have some fun with art. Let’s start by turning something you might throw away into a cool piece of art!
Have you ever looked at a plastic package and thought it could be something else? I see a boat! Let’s make it come to life with some color. First, we’ll cut out the part of the plastic that looks like a boat. But painting on plastic can be tricky because the paint doesn’t stick well. Here’s a special trick: mix white glue, a little food coloring, and a drop of dish soap. This makes the paint stick better!
Now, let’s paint! I’ll give my boat a big yellow sail and a red hull. It looks like a pirate ship sailing through blue, stormy seas. Once it’s painted, let it dry. The paint will dry see-through, which makes it perfect for hanging in a window to catch the light.
Check out these other creations! I made a robot from plastic egg cartons and a person from a compass package. All of these are made from recycled plastic. So, instead of throwing away old plastic, turn it into art!
Let’s make a fun pillowcase from an old sweater. First, tuck a pillow inside the sweater. To make wiggly feet, fold the extra fabric at the bottom, bunch it up, and wrap an elastic around it. Do the same for the other foot and the hands. For fingers, make three little bunches and wrap them with elastics. Add green felt triangles for fingernails.
For hair, push the pillow down, bunch up some fabric at the top, and wrap it with an elastic. Add some yarn for crazy hair. Use felt circles for eyes and a strip of black felt with a yellow tooth for a mouth. Now you have a monster pillow!
These pillows are easy to make and make great gifts. All you need is a pillow, an old sweater, and some felt. Get creative and have fun!
Let’s make something from beach treasures like shells and feathers. How about a panda bear? You can also create box pals using things like milk cartons and paper towel rolls. Try different shapes and colors to make them unique.
To connect the pieces, cut curved shapes and tape them together. Add a neck and a juice box for a head. Use straws for alien eyes and cover everything with paper mache. Once dry, paint your box pal in bright colors. It’s a fun way to recycle and create art!
When building a rock sculpture, make sure none of your rocks are actually turtles!
I made a robot using a cassette and old keyboard keys. Can you spot the USB stick in my movie? I challenge you to make something creative with a cassette and keyboard keys. Take a picture and share it with us at artzooka.com. What will you create today?
For more fun ideas, visit artzooka.com!
Plastic Package Art Adventure: Next time you have a plastic package, look at it closely and imagine what it could become. Could it be a spaceship, a fish, or maybe a castle? Try using the special paint mixture Jeremy mentioned: mix white glue, a little food coloring, and a drop of dish soap. Paint your creation and let it dry. Once it’s done, hang it in a window and see how the light shines through. Ask yourself: What other things can I recycle into art?
Monster Pillow Parade: Gather some old sweaters and pillows, and create a monster pillow with your friends or family. Once you have made your monster, give it a name and make up a story about its adventures. Share your story with someone at home or in class. Think about: How can you use different materials to make your monster unique?
Beach Treasure Hunt: Next time you visit the beach or a park, collect small treasures like shells, feathers, or interesting rocks. Use these to create a new art piece at home. Try making a picture frame or a small sculpture. Remember to be gentle with nature and only take things that are safe to collect. Reflect on: How does using natural materials change the way your art looks and feels?
Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript:
—
Hey, I’m Jeremy! Let’s start with some fun art projects.
Look at this! It’s a stapler package. Why would you throw this away? With a little bit of color, we can turn this plastic into a work of art. When I look at this, I see a boat. Can you see it? Up here we have the boat’s sail, and right here could be the hull, and maybe the water, and all up here could be the sky.
I’ll take my scissors and just cut this part of the plastic off right there. If I add some color to this plastic, it will be way easier to see the picture. Usually, when we paint on plastic, it’s a little tricky because the paint doesn’t really stick and it just gets all flaky. So to get it to stick, all you need to do is mix up some white glue, a little bit of food coloring, and just a drop of dish soap.
Check this out! The paint will stick to the plastic. This goes on really thick, but it dries see-through. The cool part about this is we created this paint ourselves! I’ll give my ship a big yellow sail, and then for the hull, I’ll use some red. Let’s give it a nice red hull right there. Nice! This can be my red and yellow pirate ship.
A pirate ship is not a pirate ship unless it is sailing through stormy seas, so let’s give it some stormy sea with a bit of blue water. It’s kind of a tropical blue. There we go! Once I’ve painted all of this, I want to set it off to dry.
Check out this other one I made earlier. This paint dries see-through, so they are great for hanging in the window. Now look at these other ones I’ve made! This one here I made from plastic egg cartons and a little bit of extra plastic packaging that I just taped on here and then painted. Now it looks like a robot! And this one was made from the packaging of a compass. Then I took some extra packaging, put it on top, and when I painted it, it looks like a person.
All of these are made of recycled plastic. Why throw out your old plastic packaging when you can create art with it? Start by taking a close look at your package and decide how you want to decorate it. It can be tricky to paint on plastic, but not with my special paint recipe: white glue mixed with food coloring and a drop of dish soap. The paint dries see-through, so when you hang it in the window, it really catches the light.
For more fun ideas like this, check out artzooka.com!
Now, let’s move on to another project. I was just messing with you! You know, this pillow is kind of boring, and I don’t do boring. Let’s make an artsy pillowcase! I’ve got this old sweater that I don’t wear anymore. I bet this would make a great pillowcase.
To start off, I just want to tuck this pillow right inside here. Now I want to make some little wiggly feet. I’ll start at the bottom with all this extra fabric. I’ll fold it over like that and then bunch it together right between my hands. Just like this! Now, with a little elastic, I’ll wrap it around the bunched-up part, and just like that, I have a foot.
Let’s make the other one! Perfect! Now for the hands, I’ll get this guy ready by tucking in his cuff and then bunching it all together just a little bit lower. Again, I’ll take an elastic and wrap it around the fabric. Now I can give him little tiny fingers.
To do that, I’ll make three more bunches right between my fingers: one, two, three. And then again with the elastics. There’s one, and there’s the other one. Now he has three little fingers! But we can take this a step further with some green felt. I cut out a few triangles, and these can be his little fingernails.
To do this, I just lift up the elastic, slide the fingernail underneath, and the elastic holds it in place. Perfect! Now I want to do this with both hands and both feet, and when I’m finished, he’ll look a lot more like a monster.
Let’s give it a little bit more detail. How about some hair? For the hair, I’m just going to push this pillow down like that and then bunch up some of the fabric right at the top. Then again, take an elastic and wrap it around the fabric.
Now that looks great for hair, but we can make it look crazier! I’ve taken a little bit of yarn, bunched it together, and now I can just push it inside. The elastic holds it in place. A carrot-top monster pillow!
Now for the eyes, I’ve used a bunch of circles cut out from felt, and they’re all different sizes. I glued them together, and then I get a nice monster look. I take some white glue, spread it evenly on the back of the eye, and then press it into place. Let’s do the other one. Great! Now I can add a mouth.
For the mouth, I took a little strip of black felt and gave him a pointy yellow tooth. Now I’ll glue that into place right about there. Now all the features are in place, and pillow, you are looking sharp!
If you want to make your own pillow pal, you’ll need a pillow and an old sweater or shirt. Push the pillow into the sweater, then use elastics to make hands and fingers. You can use felt to make fingernails too. Press down on your pillow at the top, add an elastic, and then some wool for hair. I used more felt to make a face for my pillow. These pillows are easy to make and they make terrific gifts!
We have lots more great ideas like this at artzooka.com!
Now, let’s move on to our next challenge. Hi Jeremy, I’m Mia! Can you make something using stuff from the beach? That’s a great challenge! Let’s see what I can create.
I’ve got some shells, feathers, and seaweed. I’ve got an idea!
It’s a panda bear! It’s all in how you look at it. Sometimes your friends are busy? No problem! How will we make some more? You know what? It’s super easy to create your own pals.
Okay, I’ve got a bunch of things here: milk cartons, juice boxes, paper towel rolls. They will make terrific box pals, and the fun part is figuring out the shapes and colors you want to make them.
Sometimes I like to just try a bunch of different things together. I think I like this long one as a body and these two shorter ones for legs. To make it easier to connect these, I’ll cut a curved shape in this one like I did on the other one. Press in the tube and cut like this. That should fit nicely.
Now that I’ve cut both legs, I’m ready to tape them into place. I want to make sure that I tape the back part too so the legs aren’t flopping all over the place. Now I have the legs connected to the body.
I’ve cut out a piece of cardboard for the neck. It has a curved edge too. I’ll just add some tape. Now our little guy’s got a neck! Now for the head, the first thing I’m going to do is open up this juice box at the top like this. Then with my scissors, I’m just going to cut a couple of little triangles at the top.
I’m going to give him a funny-shaped head. There’s one triangle there, and now I’ll cut my other one. I’ll make a cut here and another cut here. Now that I’ve made those cuts, I can fold in the side flaps like this. I want to do the same thing to both sides, and when I’m finished, it’ll look like that.
I used a little bit of tape to tape in the flaps, and that makes a perfect head. Now I can tape the head into place. There’s my body with my head, and now I just need to make some eyes. For the eyes, I’m going to use two bendy straws because I want him to have alien-looking eyes.
With my scissors, I’ll just cut right here to make some eyeballs. I’ll take some tape and tape it right to the top of the straw like that. Here’s one eye, and there’s the other. This is roughly what my guy will look like.
Now for the next step, I’ll cover the whole thing in tape. It’ll look like this. Now I can start surfacing my little dude. To surface him, I’ll use paper mache. I’ll take some thinned-out white glue and water, and then with a paintbrush, just paint the glue onto the guy.
I can take little strips of paper towel and add them on, pressing it in with my fingers. I’ll put another one right here. I’ll surface the whole thing, and when I’m done, I set it off to dry, and then it’ll look like this one. Now he’s nice and smooth and ready to be painted. You can paint yours any way you like.
Here’s one I painted earlier. I started off by covering him with a really nice green, then added some flowers on his body, gave some cool stripes to the legs, and also painted his eyes. Check out this mouth! I found a piece of corrugated cardboard, cut it out, painted it white, and now it looks great!
Our box pals are fun to make and a great way to recycle cardboard rolls and juice boxes. I started with three cardboard rolls and trimmed them a little to make them easy to connect and tape them together. Then I added a neck and a juice box for a head. If you trim the edges, you can make this cool shape.
Then I made crazy eyes out of straws, taped my pal with masking tape, and then covered him with paper mache. That’s paper dipped in watery glue, and then for the really fun part, I painted my pal lots of bright colors. Here’s the rest of my collection! I love experimenting with different shapes and decorating them in lots of different ways.
If you want to make your own box pal, the step-by-step instructions are on our website at artzooka.com.
And now, time for an artsy safety message! Remember, when building a rock sculpture, you might want to make sure none of your rocks are actually turtles!
For my artsy recycle challenge, I challenged myself to make something out of a cassette and old keyboard keys. I put them in a movie starring a paper bag. Come on and see what I made! I also put something else in my movie: a USB stick. See if you can spot where I put it.
Now sit back and enjoy cinema artzooka! Here’s the cassette and another one. And here are the old keyboard keys. Can you guess what it’s going to be? It’s a robot! Now let’s see it in a movie.
Did you like the movie? I made a robot out of a cassette and old keyboard keys. Hey, did you spot the USB stick? Take another look at where I put it!
I challenge you to make something out of a cassette and old keyboard keys. Be creative; anything goes! And when you do, take a picture and email it to me at the Artzooka website, artzooka.com. What will you create today?
—
This version removes any unnecessary or distracting elements while maintaining the essence of the original content.
