From buttons to art
April 28th, 2019 at 10:43 am (Art)
Recently I had the opportunity to attend an art workshop held by the Altadena Library on how to create button art. A quick web search on “button art” reveals a treasure trove of cool ideas. After browsing a bit, we sat down with bowls of color-sorted buttons of all sizes, a canvas, and a hot glue gun.
Here’s the composition I came up with:
It’s fun to sort through the buttons and figure out how to position them for a particular shape or effect. It’s a bit like creating a tile mosaic, except that the pieces are not uniform in size. To fill spaces, you end up layering buttons on top of other buttons, which gives it a neat three-dimensional quality. Fun to touch!
I think this would be a great craft to do with kids, although the hot glue gun makes it better for older kids. I wonder if a sheet of two-side sticky tape could do as well for younger kids. And for buttons, apparently you can order them in batches by color (or mixed colors). Overall, I think there’s something fun about seeing a daily household item, like a button, out of its context and elevated to become a piece of art. :)