5 Ways to Upcycle Art

5 min read

Deviation Actions

jempavia's avatar
By
Published:
5K Views
Traditional Art Week


A college professor of mine advocated an approach to art that involved treating it like a job, and painting for an hour each and every day. Another professor of mine said to never throw any art away. If every 18 year old traditional artist worked every day and finished only 1 painting a week, by the time they were 30 years old they'd have over 600 finished paintings and countless other paintings that weren't finished or were damaged or tossed aside out of frustration or lack of interest.

What to do with it all? Here are some ideas for reusing your art on paper!

1) Paper Dolls


Paper Doll Clothes and Accessories by jempavia Paper Dolls by jempavia


I put together some simple paper doll body and clothes templates. I made the dolls on blending card with copic, but then made all the clothes out of old or watercolor paintings.

2) Representational Collage


The inspiration for this came from a series color wheels that I made as part of testing out paper brands in an art class. In themselves, they were nothing special, but some cutting and pasting gave them a new life as rainbow flowers. I used a bit of another watercolor texture for the trees and combined them over a background created on three small 5x7 pieces of watercolor paper of unknown origin that I found stashed in a bookcase. 

 Color Wheel Flowers by jempavia

3) Mosaic Collage


Square Collage Mosaic by jempavia Diamond Collage Mosaic by jempavia Circle Collage Mosaic by jempavia

While in the mood for collage, I embarked on some Rainbow mosaics. 

These 3 bright, but simple mosaics were deceptively simple to create.  I took three paintings that I had, that had been tossed in my junk file and I coated each in a thin coat of acrylic ink, keeping it extra thin by spritzing water from a spray bottle. This thin layer makes it easier to see the images as backgrounds, without removing all of the painting's original imagery, color, and texture. 


Acrylicink by jempavia 

After the backgrounds dried, the mosaic tiles were created out of a stack of old watercolors on 140' or lighter paper by using a circular 
1" punch  and a square 1" punch and then arranged and attached with simple clear elmers glue.

Punch by jempavia

4) Hole Punch Cards


Hole Punch Card by jempavia

The same hole punches can be used to create various types of cards. Either by pasting the  punches on top of a pre-made blank card, or by punching holes in the card and gluing a segment of a work through the back to peek-a-boo through!

5) Simple Cards


Card by jempavia

All three of these cards were made from one painting, by using an inexpensive 5x7 pre-cut mat as a template. Then just cut and paste!

Card Prep by jempavia

I hope you'll enjoy upcycling your own work as much as I've enjoyed doing these projects for you! Do you have a favorite way of reusing your own art? I'm always interested in new ideas! Please share with me below in the comments!

© 2015 - 2024 jempavia
Comments15
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Nephrym's avatar
Great ideas!! Thanks so much for sharing! :D