Metal Flowers
During the school year, I teach the after school Art Club for the 5th and 6th graders in our town. I have always been interested in art installations. I think it would be cool to be part of creating art for people to see as they drive by. So this year I created one of the sessions to be an art installation.
At first I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I just knew I wanted to create an art installation.
I saw some cool hubcaps at the local art center that I teach at. I was smitten. Luckily they shared with me all their secrets. Probably the hardest part was finding used hubcaps. I found someone on Facebook Marketplace who wanted $10 a piece for old hubcaps. But that was my whole budget. He wasn’t willing to donate them. So I came up with a price I would be willing to pay and offered to take the dented hubcaps off his hands. He agreed.
The next step was to wash them and let them dry. This took much longer than I thought it would. I am grateful that my shower head is a wand. I also used a wand soap dispenser that has a scrubbing brush on one end.
Then I needed to spray paint them. My fellow teacher at Epoch Art Center in East Hampton suggested that I choose 3 colors and use the 2x paint and primer paint to “prime” them. I had to wait for a warm day in March to lay them out on my lawn to paint them, but the stars aligned and it all worked out.
The kids started painting them and it was clear after the first week that we would spend the whole 5 weeks on this project. The next week, I took scrap wood and cut them into leaf shapes and primed them with a green color. As soon as someone was done with their flower, I had them start painting their leaves. Each flower got a large leaf and a small leaf. I was thinking that the kids could just paint them different shades of green. But no, once again, kids remind me that they have really great art ideas.
The leaves have veins, pinks, blues, and even greens in splatters, polka dots and even rainbows. The variety the kids put into their leaves are just as imaginative as their hubcap flowers.
I scrounged around in my husband’s workshop to find scrap sticks of wood to use as stems. I came up with several pieces of oak from a piece of furniture that we had broken up, and some leftover aluminum pipe we used in our last home renovation. They all got painted green as well.
One week 4, I cut steep angles into the sticks and we all painted outside anything that still needed to be painted. And anything that was done, we put several coats of a top clear gloss coat on. This helped those who were still dragging their feet to make some quick choices and finish.
On the last day, I brought a shovel, and the sticks and we put them all together. I had a group of girls putting aluminum pipes together with nuts and bolts. And a group of boys and girls using the cordless drill to screw their leaves onto their stems. For the most part I had to come back after they went home to finish putting the flowers up and a few leaves. It took me until Monday the next week in pockets of time to finish planting the flowers, but they are up.
