art club: bottle cap mural

After Christmas Break, I proposed a new Art Club to the school board. This club would meet bi-weekly, sixth grade one week and fifth grade the next, to work on drawing skills and create a recycled mural depicting Van Gogh's Starry Night out of bottle caps. This is something I had stumbled up online and I felt like it was something my kids would really love to do. There were many bumps along the way, which I will talk about as I describe the process, but in the end we got some pretty amazing results. 

Step One: Planning and Preparation

- The first thing you need to right away is to start collecting plastic caps. During the school announcements, I asked for all students to bring in whatever plastic caps and lids they could find at home. I collected caps for a couple months, but even with that much time we struggled to have enough of certain colors (yellow and purple are especially hard to come by). The really cool part about students bringing in caps and lids from home is that every one had the opportunity to be a part of the project, even if they weren't in art club! My little kindergarteners just loved coming down to the art room to deliver caps to me. :)

- Once you have collected a good number of caps, students should begin sorting them by color, and then by shades and tints. (Ex. blue should be sorted into light blue, medium blue, dark blue)

- Make sure you have all necessary materials, other than caps. That would include glue guns, glue sticks, two pieces of 2x3 1/4" thick plywood ( I got mine cut at a local hardware store and was a pretty reasonable price), paint, and brushes.

sorted lids and caps

Step Two: Mapping and Painting

- Before we even though about working with all those caps, we had to prepare out plywood boards. The first part of that was to project a coloring book version (which I found online) of the Starry Night onto the boards, tracing the lines in sharpie.

- Next, we mixed paint for the colors we wanted and began painting the different areas of the board with the colors we felt would go in that section. Painting the boards would prevent any plywood from showing through the gaps in the caps and to help create a map for where different colors of caps would go.

hard at work painting the mural

Step Three: Gluing the Caps

- This part is probably the most time consuming and tedious. Before doing any of the gluing, students arranged the caps on the boards where they wanted them to go. This really helped in knowing what caps we didn't have enough of and how to strategize. For example, because we were incredibly low on yellow caps, we turned clear caps upside down on top of where we had painted the wood yellow, so the yellow would still show through. Some caps you will want face up and some face down. We turned the white ones with blue on the inside upside down for their light blue color.

- When we started gluing, we started with small details first (like the sun and stars) and worked around them as we filled it in. Working from the inside outwards seemed to help as to avoid weird gaps in the middle.

- One challenge I faced was storing the project while it was in progress. Because my art room was so small, I had to leave it on the floor, in proximity to outlets for the glue guns. Unfortunately we had a mildly traumatic incident where a student ran through the mural Godzilla style, kicking unglued caps everywhere. Luckily, we were able to fix everything before the end of the school year, but it did set us back a bit.

fifth grade Art Club students with their mural

Sixth grade Art Club students

The finished mural!

Despite the minor set backs and the time crunch, Art Club finished their mural and they did an amazing job. I could not be more thrilled with what they accomplished and proud of this amazing piece of recycled art. We are hoping to have it mounted in the school with a plaque to go with it! My students are truly amazing and I have been so blessed to have a whole year with them. My only hope is that I will be with them again next year, but right now I have no idea what the future holds...and that's ok. :)