In the last month, I have been preparing my final piece for 'the art of recycling' gallery at the end of this week, and have now (finally!) got it finished. Here is an account of what I have been doing.
My idea first came from another person in my class; for his half term homework, he had made a bin out of rolls of magazine. This idea had actually come from an artist called Mark Montano. Here is an image of the original piece.

For my piece, I thought I would edit this, and use rolls of an old book, instead of the magazine. I used the book because I thought it would look a bit more effective- I could have a more colourful flower within it, creating quite a nice contrast of colour and creamy-brown. All of my rolls were also the same size,with no variation (to save a bit of time.) . Finally, in the original, Montano had used one large, continuing spiral role for the base; instead, I used a circle of cardboard, covered in book scraps. Because the bass was thinner, I also had to make a shelf for it- to help it stand up a little better. 

To get ideas, I made some (pretty large!) detailed Spider diagrams, on an A3 Sheet of paper; one for initial ideas, one for planning the actual piece, and one for things that I could improve on. Here is an image of the planning. Sorry about the slightly poor quality.

Then, I made a maquette (model) of my final idea. Here is a photograph. I made it a little bit smaller than the final one. I also made just one; the plan was to make three, but unfortunately, I did not have enough time, so I only completed two =(

The next step was making the final piece. I did this buy rolling up lots of 1cm wide strips of an old book, around a nail varnish lid, and stuck them all together using a glue gun. Then, to make the shelf, I stuffed an old cardboard box with newspaper. I also covered it with book pages. Finally, to make the flower, I stuck three straws together and covered it with green sweet wrappers. For the flower head, I rolled up a book page and covered with sweet wrappers, and petals, I cut out cardboard shapes, and again covered with sweet wrappers. 

When I was making my final piece, I did make some amendments. For example, I found an old brown t-shirt, and stuck in into the pot, rolled up, to look like soil. I also aimed to make it a little neater- whether that worked, I'm not sure! 

I'm quite happy with my final piece. However, I would have liked to make three pots, (one medium as well as the small and large) but unfortunately, I had no time. Next time, I would also make it neater on the whole- maybe being careful with the glue (e.g long strings of it), and make the back look better. 

 

The gallery opens on Friday 10th December to the general public; please try and come if possible! More details are on the Maiden Erlegh School website- follow the Peacock Gallery link.