Turn your recyclables into a simple art project that you and your kids will love.
My daughter is a big fan of tinkering with our bin full of recyclables. Cardboard rolls are easily her favorite. She loves to paint them and tie them together, poke holes in them and anything else she can imagine. We found ourselves with an over abundance of paper towel rolls this weekend and wanted to play around with them. What we came up with were these simple paper towel roll sculptures.
All you will need is a paper towel roll or two, a piece of cardboard, acrylic paint and a low temp glue gun. (Children should be supervised when operating a glue gun)
Your children have a lot of freedom to do whatever they please here.
Twist, flatten, fold, curl and cut a paper towel roll into any sort of abstract shape. When you are satisfied with the shape of your cardboard sculpture, widen the bottom end and use a low temp glue gun to glue your sculpture to a square of sturdy cardboard. If your project is top-heavy, add an additional square of cardboard to help weigh it down. You may choose to paint your statue before or after mounting it. We both chose to paint after.
My five year old had intense focus while working on her masterpiece. She started with a single paper towel tube, flattening and rolling it and then inserted it into a second tube. It was explained to me that she wanted her sculpture to be really tall. I loved that idea! She used a pair of scissors to carefully cut fringes into the curled end of her statue. I helped her cut three squares from a piece of cardboard. She glued two of the squares together to form her base and then added the third square to her sculpture. I adore watching her create and listening as she explains her process. When she was done, she painted her sculpture and then set it aside to dry.
I have to admit, I had just as much fun making these as my daughter did. My daughter’s finished piece was quite interesting. I loved it. It looked like a piece of modern art that I might see at a museum. I see many more sculptures like these in her future.
If you enjoyed this, you may also like these Toilet Roll Structures from Happy Hooligans.
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